Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol called his 1842 work Dead Souls an “epic poem in prose,” though most critics and scholars now refer to it as a novel. Structured in part as an analog to Dante’s Inferno, Dead Souls is an absurdist social satire of imperial Russia before the emancipation of the serfs, especially the foibles and customs of the Russian nobility. Though Gogol is not interested in strict realism, his portraits of nobles who speak French more than Russian, daydream rather than become adequate estate managers, and are so blinded by rank and status they cannot detect a con artist, made the work an instant classic. It cemented Gogol’s reputation as a deft and humorous social commentator.

The work—intended to be a trilogy—remains incomplete, ending mid-sentence, as Gogol burned the original conclusion to the second part before his death in 1852.

Gogol was born in 1809 in what is now Ukraine, to a minor noble family. In adulthood, he moved to the imperial capital of Saint Petersburg, where he worked as a minor civil servant and wrote his first collection of stories in 1831, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, which depict Ukrainian life.