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  • Published: 15 December 2004
  • ISBN: 9781400043194
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 488
  • RRP: $49.99

Dead Souls




'Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange' Vladimir Nabokov

Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is the great comic masterpiece of Russian literature–a satirical and splendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces.

Gogol hoped to show the world “the untold riches of the Russian soul” in this 1842 novel, which he populated with a Dickensian swarm of characters: rogues and scoundrels, landowners and serfs, conniving petty officials–all of them both utterly lifelike and alarmingly larger than life. Setting everything in motion is the wily antihero, Chichikov, the trafficker in “dead souls”–deceased serfs who still represent profit to those clever enough to trade in them.

This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel’s lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.

  • Published: 15 December 2004
  • ISBN: 9781400043194
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 488
  • RRP: $49.99

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About the authors

Nikolai Gogol

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are known for their highly-acclaimed translations of Dostoevsky, Gogol ad Tolstoy. Their translation of The Brothers Karamazov won America's prestigious PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize.