Dead Souls Summary | Chapterly
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol: A Complete Summary "Russia, where are you flying to? Answer me! She gives no answer." Overview Dead Souls (1842) is Nikolai Gogol's masterpiece and one of the strangest, funniest, and most disturbing novels in Russian literature. It follows Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a charming and enigmatic swindler, as he travels through provincial Russia buying "dead souls," the names of serfs who have died but are still listed on the census rolls and therefore still count as taxable property. Chichikov's scheme is bizarre but ingenious: by purchasing dead serfs on paper, he can mortgage them as if they were real property and acquire wealth and social standing. His journey from one provincial landowner to the next becomes Gogol's vehicle for satirizing every layer of Russian society: the lazy, the greedy, the sentimental, the brutal, and the absurd. Gogol intended Dead Souls as the first part of a Russian Divine Comedy, moving from Inferno through Purgatorio to Paradiso. He completed only the first part. He burned the manuscript of Part Two shortly before his death, believing it was not worthy. What remains is the Inferno: a portrait of a society so corrupt that even its crimes are pathetic...