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    Dead Souls
    Dead Souls
    Dead Souls
    Audiobook15 hours

    Dead Souls

    Written by Nikolai Gogol

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

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    About this audiobook

    Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these "souls" as collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Nikolai Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov, and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov. Dead Souls, Russia's first major novel, is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy.

    This version of Dead Souls is the translation by C. J. Hogarth.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 25, 2011
    ISBN9781452671222
    Author

    Nikolai Gogol

    Nikolai Gogol was a Russian novelist and playwright born in what is now considered part of the modern Ukraine. By the time he was 15, Gogol worked as an amateur writer for both Russian and Ukrainian scripts, and then turned his attention and talent to prose. His short-story collections were immediately successful and his first novel, The Government Inspector, was well-received. Gogol went on to publish numerous acclaimed works, including Dead Souls, The Portrait, Marriage, and a revision of Taras Bulba. He died in 1852 while working on the second part of Dead Souls.

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    Reviews for Dead Souls

    4/5

    52 ratings46 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Pt. I good; Pt. II in fragments, unrewarding, pointless--perhaps worth another try since it's been 25 years since I read it
    • 4/5
      A rollicking, farcical road tale set in Russia in the first half of the 19th Century. Follows Chichikov, a petty bourgeois con man… a man who is “not too fat, and not too thin” in the words of the author, on a trip around the country to buy up “dead souls,” which are peasants who have died but are still counted as living until the next census happens. Chichikov hopes to make his fortune by charming lots of landowners into giving them away for nothing, and then mortaging them under new regulations that allow Russian landowners to mortage their estates to the treasury at roubles-to-the-soul. Gogol uses the misadventures of our antihero to paint a humorous and loving picture of Russian life in the first half of the 1800s. Kind of reminds me of Tristram Shandy.
    • 3/5
      It took me a while to chug through this one, but it definitely was worth a try. Some of the characters are hilariously ridiculous, which is what I think the highlight of the story is. I was kind of hoping for a slightly more exciting reason behind the collection of dead souls, but I did like the story overall.
    • 3/5
      The novel affords fascinating insights into life in rural Russia in the 19th Century. The plot is amusing but even to outline it would be to give away too much.
    • 4/5
      Gogol's masterpiece of 19th century Russian literature is actually only the first part of a planned three part epic "poem" of the life of Chichikov -- a charming and crafty mid-level bureaucrat with a eye to raise himself up in Russian society. We meet Chichikov as the rest of a small village meets him: a substantial looking stranger who quickly charms us by doing and saying exactly what we would want him to do or say. As we spend more time with our hero, we begin to travel out to property owners in the area where Chichikov offers to purchase "dead souls" -- that is, peasants on the property owners rolls who have died, but not yet been reported as dead to the authorities. This all seems very mysterious to both the reader and a portion of the property owners, but we still can't help liking that Chichikov. Along the way, Gogol hilariously satirizes Russian society, with each visit forming almost a stand-alone story of a different type of provincial Russian. As you might expect, it is possible to be *too* charming, and this weird plan eventually backfires and sets Chichikov and his two servants back out on the road. After the first part of his masterwork was published, Gogol set to work on the second part (wherein our hero is taught a lesson) and looked forward to the third (a Christian redemption), but struggled with his writing. He burnt an early version of the manuscript, wrote another one, and then fell in with a priest who ordered him to burn the sinful pages. Gogol did and died soon after as a result of extreme fasting. The editor of this volume puts together a partial second and third part of the work from earlier drafts and notes -- they are rough, but do give you an idea of the arc of the story.While Gogol came to a tragic end, Chichikov can live happily ever after (pre-downfall and pre-redemption), stuck at the end of part 1 of the masterpiece, riding off into the sunset with his lists of dead souls.
    • 3/5
      Dead Souls suffers from being so incomplete and disjointed but the first half at least offers an amusing plot and some wonderfully crafted characters which together give an insight into Russian society at the time.
    • 3/5
      The parts I loved I really loved, it was very funny and insightful. But then it goes on and on in excrutiating detail and the end of the book is just fragments (it's unfinished or the manuscript was lost or something). It's kind of a frustrating read. You should read it not for the story, but for the little snippets or sketches of character that seem true and funny sprinkled throughout. I liked it overall but would not really recommend it. The first 150 pages or so are the best.
    • 4/5
      A great idea that provides us with an unpredictable story both funny and tragic. Great character studies and lots of good 'stories within the story'.
    • 4/5
      I was so much fun! Maybe it was not the best translation, but it still managed to put across the author's style.
      I felt like Chichikov was the Russian Sutpen, but more confident and calmed.
      Normally stories begin telling the hero's life, but this one ended with it.
      Schade dass the author burnt the second part.
    • 3/5
      Some have compared this book to the Divine Comedy. The main characters journey through early 19th century Russia. Dead Souls refers to serfs (slaves) that have died. In Russia, landowners had slaves that were counted decennial for the cenus. The landowners were taxed for these slaves, also referred to as souls, every year, even if they were dead. Chichikov, our "hero", develops a scheme to purchase these dead souls as if they were living. Therefore, relieving the burden from the landowners who can then reduce their tax load. The secret is the main character can cash in on these souls by mortgaging them to buy land, although he only wants to appear as a good citizen who is relieving the tax load from landownders. The plot is only to display Russia during this time period, very much like Huckleberry Finn does for late 19th century. more to come.//..
    • 4/5
      Satirical and funny and at times very profound.
    • 2/5
      Just like Tolstoy, Gogol seems to revel in torturing the reader with agrarian strategies, but the book is punctuated with so many wicked asides and hilarious vignettes - the drafts cheat was my favourite - that I ploughed ahead and finally managed to finish it. Unlike Gogol.
    • 5/5
      The first book of "Dead Souls" is picaresque and wonderful, but the remnants of the second book are just outstanding. The depth displayed in the fragments of Book 2 elevate Gogol from a cheeky, vicious satirist to a real humanitarian artist.
    • 4/5
      When you think of Russian novels, you probably think of doorstop weight ones like War and Peace or Crime and Punishment. Dead Souls feels downright slim compared to those. And considerably more lighthearted as well. It took me a long time to read the book, but that's not Gogol's fault; I've just had my mind on something else lately and have found it hard to concentrate on much of anything. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this story of Pavlov Chichikov and his quest to buy dead souls from local landowners.The characters in this book and the situations in which Chichikov finds himself are a hoot. I think my favorite was Nozdrev, the compulsive gambler and liar, who ends up being the one to expose the truth about Chichikov to the community.I'd definitely read Gogol again, but I may save him until the future when I can pay a little closer attention to his work.
    • 5/5
      Imagine your a Russion nobleman but you're poor, you can't afford to own people. But you must own people in order to "count". So what you do is buy the papers of dead farmers, promising the previous owner to properly take care of the paperwork. At one point, a lady gets suspicious, suspecting that he makes money from these dead farmers, so she refuses to sell him her absolutely worthless dead farmers papers.The plot is brilliant, the writing is entertaining like most older Russion novels.
    • 4/5
      This is a funny book. Bureaucratic foibles permit the collecting of the identities of the no-longer-living for profit.
    • 5/5
      This is absolutely brilliant humor. Gogol is better imo than even Cervantes. I have read all of Gogol's short stories and this surpass them all. Absolute hilarity at every turn and almost everyone gets made fun of. This is absolutely on my read again list. I read the Guerney translation. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
    • 5/5
      I consider Gogol to be an artist first, and a writer second. It's hard to recommend him highly enough, but can we suffice it to say his fan club included Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Pushkin and Nabokov? I heard Mel Brooks raving about him in an interview once! I believe his four main powers as an artist are; 1) Pithy description and detail. Whether a character has a life span of eight chapters or four sentences, their image is indelible. 2) Living dialogue. The conversations of the many characters are sparkling with life. 3) A kaleidoscope of tones and voices. Fire and Brimstone Sermons, direct addresses, stand-up comedians, old fashioned yarn spinners, verbal landscape painters, whirling in a symphony of images and tones and voices. 4) The magical power to foreground both form and content simultaneously. Also, as with all the greatest literature, I suggest reading some passages out loud to truly feel the rhythm that only Gogol could establish in a novel that jumps from brilliant to goofy and sad to hilarious, as if they were all stones within leaping distance of each other across the swirling water of a creek. I suggest the Andrew R. MacAndrew translation.
    • 5/5
      In my effort to read more classics, Dead Souls was the perfect entry point back into the works of the Russian greats. Although I haven’t compared it to older translations, I found this one by Rayfield to be terrific. The language is easy to understand, but also manages to capture the poetics of prose wonderfully. Right off the bat, I was completely enchanted by the tone of the story as we follow our protagonist, Chichikov, around town as he goes about meeting with different landowners in a seemingly bizarre quest to buy their dead serfs, serfs whose deaths hadn’t yet been recorded by the tax authorities. Each encounter with these characters beats the previous encounter in terms of the surreal and absurd. We see how these landowners and government officials are silly, selfish, greedy, and corrupt, reflecting a society that’s become morally vapid. Gogol strings us along for a while before we find out the purpose of the dead souls, but instead of becoming impatient, I was happy to be strung along in a satire that has whimsy, a charming wink-wink tone, but also earnest exhortations to really examine the perilous path towards which society was headed.

      Dead Souls in an unfinished manuscript and I was afraid that I’d be dissatisfied with the lack of true resolution at the end. Yet, even when the manuscript ends in the middle of a sentence, it luckily worked well. There’s a gathering in which a prince begins to issue a call to reform the nation, a kind of “call to arms.” The nation faces two choices (as does Chichikov, who gets punished and keeps getting second chances): to keep perpetuating the moral decay or turn over a new leaf. It seemed a very cinematic ending even though we don’t see which choice the nation (and Chichikov) opted for.
    • 3/5
      I’ve read several novels by Russian authors, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Grossman, so I am familiar with the genre and have even been comfortable with the style and culture of the 19th century writers. While I was moderately entertained by parts of this work, I found it somewhat slower and more difficult to engage than some of the others I’ve read. Most disturbing, however, is the fact that in several places, large chunks of the original manuscript have been lost. To be reading along and suddenly come to a gap with the statement, “several pages of the original manuscript were lost”. This, along with an ending that was very much unresolved left me very unsatisfied. The story follows the adventures of a ne’er-do-well wanderer, Chichikov, who embarks on the project of acquiring title to deceased serfs for the purpose of pulling off his latest fraud. There are several interesting and comedic interactions between Chichikov and various estate owners. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the cons outweigh the pros in,this instance and I cannot recommend it. If you are looking for a 19th century Russian novel, read Crime and Punishment instead.
    • 5/5
      The most idiosyncratic omniscient narrator in literature.
    • 3/5
      Gelezen toen ik 17 was, volop in mijn "Russische periode"; was er helemaal weg van.
    • 5/5
      The first two-thirds are better than the last third. Thoroughly enjoyed this book, though. What a master of depicting characters!
    • 1/5
      The copy I read was from Project Guttenberg and ended in mid sentence. Even without the sudden ending it should be noted that the story was anticlimactic. Most of the book is spent gathering dead souls only to have the act become pointless in the end. If other copies have a more satisfying, i.e. complete, ending I could possibly recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      Dead Souls raises the fundamental puzzling problem of literary theory: the question of an author's personal involvement in his work, meaning, of how far, Gogol's outlook on life can impinge on the lives of his protagonists (or heroes) without leading, as in Gogol's own case, to insanity and suicide. Dead Souls is a fragmented work that upon finishing the second volume of which Gogol fell under the influence of a priest who advised him to burn it. He regarded Gogol's literary work as an abomination to the eyes of God and admonished Gogol to lead a sequestered life at the monastery to atone for his sin. There Gogol suicidally took to his bed, refused all provisions and died nine days later. The remaining manuscripts of Dead Souls are rather fragmented as the four chapters of the second volume are recalled and put together through the word of mouth. The first volume affords the whole scaffold and theme of Gogol's ambitious work. As Gogol's work on the novel proceeded, its theme took on more and more grandiose proportions in his mind. At first he wrote without forming any concrete plan in his head but the beginning of the first volume already contains hints of how Gogol hopes to fulfill his mission of saving Russia, which was looking up to him with eyes full of expectation. But quite soon the fact that the whole of Russia would appear in his novel (in fact the skein of characters the hero encounters does represent the whole of Russia, in their skepticism, greed, fear, paranoia) was no longer enough to satiate him. Gogol was getting all the more convinced of his messiah-like mission to save Russia and he began to regard Dead Souls as the means God had given him to intercede for his fellow comrades. Brooding over the fate of mankind in general and of his countrymen in particular, Gogol was puzzled by man's perverse habit of straying from the road which lay wide open before and which, if he followed it, would lead him to some magnificent "palace fit for an emperor to live in", and of preferring instead to follow and chase after all sorts of will-o'-the-wisps to the abyss and then asking in horror what the right road was. But Gogol's own pursuit (to the truth and meaning of existence), was unfortunately, a will-o'-the-wisps which brought him to the abyss into which he finally precipitated himself. It was through the numerous characters, with whom Gogol intended to represent all of Russia, that all the stupidities and absurdities of all the "clever fellows" were caricatured and reflected and therefore became more apparent to us. The work is therefore highly satirical of the senselessness of the noisy contemporary world, and the deceitfulness of the illusions that led mankind astray. Notwithstanding all that remains of the second volume of Dead Souls is a number of various fragments of four chapters and one fragment of what appears to be the final chapter, the plot deduced from the context is nothing but discernible. But no final judgment of the complete second volume (and maybe another volume that was utterly lost) of Dead Souls can be based on what has been crudely recovered. Simple and uneventful the plot might have been, the essence of the book simmers on the ground that injustice cannot be rooted out by punishment and that the only way of restoring the reign of justice in Russia was to appeal to the inbred sense of honor that resided in every Russia's heart. The plot is simple. Collegiate Councilor Pavel Ivanovich Chichiknov arrived in the town N. to buy up all the peasants who died before a new census was taken for the landowners were obligated to pay taxes for these dead serfs. With a subtle resourcefulness and perspicacity, he purchased these dead serfs for resettlement in land that was distributed for free. Was he to acquire them at a considerably lower price than what the Trustee Council would give him, a great fortune would be in store for him. Under the pretext of looking for a place to settle and under all sorts of other pretexts and chicanery, he undertook to scrutinize all parts of Russia where he could buy most conveniently and cheaply the sort of peasants he wanted. He did not approach any landowner indiscriminately, but selected those with whom he could negotiate such deals with the least difficulty, trying first to make their acquaintance and gain their confidence. Conducting himself with the utmost decorum and discretion, he was extremely meticulous in find out all the leading landowners and the number of dead souls each of them owned. But the thought that the serfs were not real serfs was never absent from his mind: a pricking thought that rendered him anxious to settle the tricky business soon as possible. But the purchase of dead souls soon became inevitably a topic of the town's general conversation, in which views and opinions were expressed regarding whether serfs should be purchased for resettlement. No one was not astounded by the news of Chichikov's purchase. Some demanded an explanation but paradoxically the affair seemed to be deprived of any proper explanation. Readers might have raised the same question: What was the meaning of these dead souls? There is no logic in dead souls. How can one buy dead souls? Others quailed at the possible outbreak of mutiny so vast a number of rowdy peasants Chichikov contrived to transport. The vague identity of Chichikov also added to the public's paranoia. Whether Chichikov's tricky business succeed or not, Dead Souls positions itself as Gogol's judgment of mankind, being a similitude to or even an inspiration to Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Dead Souls offers a quasi-biblical solution as Gogol brings about his protagonist's spiritual regeneration: think not of dead souls, but of one's own living soul and follow a path with God's help.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant satire that resonates not just in 19th Cent. Russia but just as well today.
    • 3/5
      Interesting without being captivating. Coming to the novel, I had expectations of satire and humor based on reading his short stories, but I had no idea how the book/story would take shape. It turns out that my expectations were met, as it was a very humorous and satirical volume with little in the way of story. Gogol's descriptions of the hypocrisy of the Russian nobility and life in provincial Russia are masterful. His observation of the reality beneath the surface was penetrating and scathing, and his manner of expressing it beautiful and poetic. That said, it got to be too much for me at times, and there wasn't enough plot to keep me really excited about picking the book up. I think it would have worked better as a short story, or perhaps in a larger context (for example, if he had completed the planned trilogy of which this book made up the first "Inferno" installment).
    • 3/5
      Gelezen toen ik 17 was, volop in mijn "Russische periode"; was er helemaal weg van.
    • 2/5
      Gogol has some really important points to say but I found myself getting disinterested in it in parts despite it's potential to be a radical text.
    • 4/5
      Lovely cynical romp through serf-filled Russia, especially if you enjoy portraits of despicable people.