GajimaruClassics.
Dead SoulsOn the coverMaslenitsa, Boris Kustodiev, 1919
Dead Souls
A smooth swindler tours the Russian provinces buying up “dead souls”, serfs who have died but still count on the tax rolls, in a wild, comic, savage panorama of a nation’s follies.
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The funniest of the great Russian novels, a gallery of grotesques and a con so strange it could only be true to its time. Gogol’s comedy has a savage edge that lingers.
SettingProvincial Russia, 1830s
In serf-owning Russia, human beings were counted as property and taxed by the “soul” between censuses, a bureaucratic absurdity Gogol turns into the engine of a national satire.