# Dead Souls

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/nikolai-v-gogol/dead-souls/9781857152807

JSON version (same data): https://www.bookquiver.com/nikolai-v-gogol/dead-souls/9781857152807.json

![Dead Souls](https://quivercdn.com/covers/everyman/nikolai-gogol/dead-souls_978-18-5715-280-7-423ce92f.jpg?v=2026-09-20%2005%3A03%3A38)

- Book: [Dead Souls](https://www.bookquiver.com/nikolai-v-gogol/dead-souls) ([Dead Souls.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/nikolai-v-gogol/dead-souls.md))
- Authors: [Nikolai V. Gogol](https://www.bookquiver.com/nikolai-v-gogol)
- Publisher: Everyman
- ISBN: 978-18-5715-280-7
- Pages: 480
- Published: 2004-09-02
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Hardcover

## Description

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for " dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. 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 humour, and delight in human oddity and error.