Dead Souls

From the award-winning translators of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment comes a magnificent new translation of Gogol's final masterpiece. For the first time, Chichikov, Gogol's trafficker in "souls" (peasants who can be bought, sold, and mortgaged by landowers) is brought to life in an English edition that captures the writer's virtually comic and lyrical style.

Gogol's tale of a dismissed civil servant turned unscrupulous confidence man is the most essentially Russian of all the great novels in Russian literature. With its rich and ebullient language, ironic twists, and cast of comedic characters, Dead Souls (1842) stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century. This brilliant new translation by Christopher English is complemented by a superb introductory essay by the pre-eminent Gogol scholar, Robert Maguire.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was born in Ukraine and left for St. Petersburg at the age of nineteen. From 1836 to 1848 he lived mainly in Rome, where he wrote Dead Souls. Robert A. Maguire is professor emeritus of Russian studies at Columbia University. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and several other awards for his studies and published works.