Who is this eccentric character who roams the vast Tsarist Empire in search of dead souls? He doesn't ask for honey or wheat; nor does he desire hemp or cattle; the only merchandise Chichikov wants to buy on his visits to various landowners is the deceased servants whose deaths are not recorded in the census. What kind of madness drives someone to acquire a troop of corpses? Under the pretext of saving their owners from paying taxes on them, our hero's objective in trafficking these souls is to obtain state subsidies granted to those who owned a certain number of serfs, and thus reinvent himself as a grotesque gentleman.
In this masterpiece, the first great novel of Russian literature, Gogol not only created a highly detailed and realistic portrait of the harsh life of the provinces. Furthermore, with his daring and witty prose, the author managed to craft a relentless and deva...read more
