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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls

ABRIDGED EDITION

Paper book: €23.99

Digital: €11.99

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

A very polite guest makes a very strange request. Manilov, a gentle and very kind landowner, welcomes Chichikov, a charming visitor he met in town. Suddenly, Chichikov says what he wants to buy: dead peasants. Manilov…

The world of the book

A Russia where people own “souls”. The novel is set in 19th-century Russia. Peasants there are not free: they are serfs, owned by a nobleman. They are counted in “souls”: a hundred souls means a hundred male peasants.…

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