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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls

ABRIDGED EDITION

Paper book: €18.99

Digital: €4.99

Original publication
1842
Pages
368
Difficulty
Hard
Genres
Humor, History
Moods
Have a laugh, Travel back in time, Think it through
Translated from
Russian

Book summary

Chichikov arrives in a provincial town, charms all of polite society and pays visits to the landowners round about. He offers them a strange deal: to buy their dead serfs. These peasants have died since the last census, but they are still on the registers, and their masters still pay tax on them.

From estate to estate come the miser, the boor, the suspicious widow and the dreamer: Gogol draws from them a gallery of irresistible portraits, and one of the funniest novels in Russian literature.

With the translation always in front of you, this humorous novel is a pleasure to read in the language you are learning.

The plot

とても礼儀正しい客の、とても奇妙な頼み。心優しく人当たりのよい地主マニーロフは、町で知り合った感じのよい客チチコフを家に迎える。突然チチコフは、買いたいものを口にする。死んだ農奴だ。マニーロフはパイプを取り落とし、何分も口をぽかんと開けたまま。客は気が狂ったのか? いや、チチコフは落ち着き払い、礼儀正しく、大まじめだ。

The world of the book

「魂」を所有するロシア。物語の舞台は19世紀のロシア。農民は自由ではなく、貴族に属する農奴だった。農奴は「魂」の数で数えられ、百の魂とは男の農民百人のこと。死んだ農民も次の人口調査まで名簿に残り、主人はその分の税を払い続けた。これが題名の「死せる魂」である。農奴制は1861年に廃止される。

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