Showing results for "Dead Souls" in Literary Fiction

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Allan Corduner, best known for his extensive stage and screen credits including Homeland, Da Vinci's Demons and portraying Sir Arthur Sullivan to Jim Broadbent's Gilbert in Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. This definitive recording...

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.

Gogol's great comic masterpiece paints an hilariously satirical picture of provincial life in 19th century Russia. Its publication in 1847 not only provided inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian writers, but fanned the already flickering flames of social discontent which were eventually to flare up and consume Russia in the revolution of 1917.

Un caballero de industria ruso, Chichikov, ha descubierto que si compra a sus antiguos duenos los siervos muertos despues del ultimo censo, puede lograr grandes subvenciones y esas son las almas muertas. La meta del autor fue "tratar de mostrar el alma rusa, con su variedad de dotes y riquezas morales pero tambien con sus defectos, que caracterizan al pueblo ruso".