Dead Souls portrays and demonstrates the flaws and faults of the Russian mentality and character through endeavors of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and typical people of the Russian middle-class, whom he encounters. The novel reveals an encompassing picture of the ailing social system in Russia after the unsuccessful French invasion.

This collection of essays resituates poetic works by Derzhavin, Krylov, Batisushkov, Pushkin, Girboedov, Lermontov, Baratynsky and Pavlova, within the force fields of contradicoty cultural pressures, as are the once best-selling prose narratives of Narezhnyi, Karamzin, Viazemsky and others.

This book, first published in 1926, aimed to introduce to English readers to a great and complex foreign writer in as simple terms as possible. As this was the first extensive study of Gogol in English, the author chiefly considered the general characteristics of the man and his work. This book will be of interest to students of literature.

This strikingly original work presents an integral and inclusive explanatory model for the elusive narrative strategies of Gogol's Dead Souls; in the process, it draws larger conclusions about Gogol's creative methods and aesthetic concerns. Throughout his career, Gogol manifests two seemingly contradictory urges: the urge toward order, system, clarity and wholeness, and the urge toward disorder, disruption, obscurity, and fragmentation. The author seeks to make a system, an anatomy, of Gogol's impulses toward disorder and disruption in Dead Souls in all their various and distinctive aspects. In anatomizing Gogolian disorder, she explores the mythology of creativity and lying in Gogol; his (at least literary) fear of the family; the relation between the uses of obscurity in Dead Souls and the poetry of Russian Sentimentalism, especially Zhukovskii's; Dead Souls as parable; and the mutually subversive relation between ¹ction and non¹ction in Gogol.

INTRODUCTION Dead Souls, first published in 1842, is the great prose classic of Russia. That amazing institution, "the Russian novel," not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work by the same author, a short story entitled The Cloak; this idea has been wittily expressed by another compatriot, who says: "We have all issued out of Gogol's Cloak." Dead Souls, which bears the word "Poem" upon the title page of the original, has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the Pickwick Papers, while E. M. Vogue places its author somewhere between Cervantes and Le Sage. However considerable the influences of Cervantes and Dickens may have been—the first in the matter of structure, the other in background, humour, and detail of characterisation—the predominating and distinguishing quality of the work is undeniably something foreign to both and quite peculiar to itself; something which, for want of a better term, might be called the quality of the Russian soul. The English reader familiar with the works of Dostoieffsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoi, need hardly be told what this implies; it might be defined in the words of the French critic just named as "a tendency to pity." One might indeed go further and say that it implies a certain tolerance of one's characters even though they be, in the conventional sense, knaves, products, as the case might be, of conditions or circumstance, which after all is the thing to be criticised and not the man. But pity and tolerance are rare in satire, even in clash with it, producing in the result a deep sense of tragic humour. It is this that makes of Dead Souls a unique work, peculiarly Gogolian, peculiarly Russian, and distinct from its author's Spanish and English masters.

This eBook has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Dead Souls portrays and demonstrates the flaws and faults of the Russian mentality and character through endeavors of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and typical people of the Russian middle-class, whom he encounters. The novel reveals an encompassing picture of the ailing social system in Russia after the unsuccessful French invasion.

An introduction to and advice on book collecting with a glossary of terms and tips on how to identify first editions and estimated values for over 20,000 collectible books published in English (including translations) over the last three centuries-about half are literary titles in the broadest sense (novels, poetry, plays, mysteries, science fiction, and children's books); and the other half are non-fiction (Americana, travel and exploration, finance, cookbooks, color plate, medicine, science, photography, Mormonism, sports, et al).

First published in the year 1842, Russian writer-activist Nikolai Gogol's book 'Dead Souls' was one of the most appreciated satirical works of the 19th century Russian literature. The purpose of the novel was to demonstrate the flaws and faults of the Russian mentality and character.

"Dead Souls" is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842 and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel presents the chronicles of the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle aristocracy of the time, which embodied pretentiousness, fake significance, and low morals, which was also hinted at in the novel's title.