Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol, C.J. Hogarth (Translator)

Overview

Dead Souls is a unique novel that has become a unique standard of ironic prose for Russian literature. The story of the ingenious businessman Chichikov, buying up the „dead souls” of serfs in a remote province, still impresses with its modernity and subtle humor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788382175134
Publisher:	Ktoczyta.pl
Publication date:	02/13/2020
Sold by:	Libreka GmbH
Format:	eBook
Pages:	449
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	6 Years

About the Author

Nikolai Gogol was born on March 20, 1809, in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. He attended the Nizhyn School of Higher Art, now Nizhyn Gogol State University, where he first began writing. On leaving school in 1828, Gogol moved to St. Petersburg to pursue his literary ambitions. His first collection of short stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, was published in 1831 to general acclaim. While his early stories were written in the tradition of Ukrainian folklore, his later stories, known as the Petersburg tales, established his reputation as a great surrealist and satirist of life under the Russian Empire. In his later years, Gogol lived abroad throughout Europe, particularly Italy, where he developed a great appreciation for Rome, and wrote the first part of his unfinished masterpiece, Dead Souls. He died in Moscow, Russia, on February 21, 1852.

George Gibian was Goldwin Smith Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His honors include Fulbright, Guggenheim, American Philosophical Society, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. He was the author of The Man in the Black Coat: Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, The Interval of Freedom: Russian Literature During the Thaw, and Tolstoj and Shakespeare. He was the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and Gogol’s Dead Souls, and of the Viking Penguin Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader. Professor Gibian’s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the Christian Science Monitor, and Newsday, among others.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Admired not only for its enduring comic portraits but also for its sense of moral purpose." —-Meriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature

Clifford Odets

Where else has one met such a group of brawling men, all of them straining, pleading, expostulating - bellowing to be released from the printed page? In Homer, in Shakespeare, in Rabelais, but not in many other places. Here are characters who veritably fly at the reader's throat.

Editorial Reviews

Considered one of the great novels in the Russian canon, this book is a symbolic snapshot of nineteenth-century Russian life and an intense literary experience…Narrator Tom Weiner has a deep, robust, nasally tinged voice that captures the tone of the book.”

AudioFile

Considered one of the world’s finest satires, this picaresque work traces the adventures of the social-climbing Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant out to seek his fortune. It is admired not only for its enduring comic portraits but also for its sense of moral purpose.”

Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature

Gogol's Dead Souls, has achieved a magnificent re-birth. . . . Rayfield's translation is one that Vladimir Nabokov would unreservedly admire. . . . A big, beautiful book and a mould-breaking classic reinvigorated.”

-William Boyd, The Guardian 

From the Publisher

Considered one of the great novels in the Russian canon, this book is a symbolic snapshot of nineteenth-century Russian life, and an intense literary experience. The story revolves around Chichikov, a man who comes to a Russian town to buy the souls of dead peasants who are still listed on the census, setting in motion a story of greed and distrust. Narrator Tom Weiner has a deep, robust, nasally tinged voice that captures the tone of the book at the beginning, but he doesn’t vary his pitch and characters enough to keep the work moving. He also reads a bit too quickly; slowing down would allow us to more easily digest the philosophical aspects of the story. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2010 - AudioFile