Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls" is produced here in a definitive translation by B.G. Guerney. In his introduction, Renè Wellek opines that "whoever comes to the reading of Gogol's 'Dead Souls' with preconceptions of the nature of the Russian novel based upon reading of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy will be surprised and delighted to discover something very different. Here is a comic epic, a gallery of portraits, a loosely assembled travel story with little psychology, no tragic conflict, no debates concerning God and immortality." Instead, Gogol paints a realistic panorama of Russia in the 1840s, complete with a vivid cast of boorish, fraudulent, and banal characters afflicting the culture of the day. Clearly a classic of Russian literature.

Dead Souls

Literature & Fiction

Nikolái Gógol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Classics

International Thomson Publishing

Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature. It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "an extraordinarily fine piece of work" and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol's original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier drafts of Dead Souls. The text is accompanied by Susanne Fusso's introduction and by appendixes that present excerpts from Guerney's translations of other drafts of Gogol's work and letters Gogol wrote around the time of the writing and publication of Dead Souls.

Literary

Penguin Classics

Contemporary

Penguin USA (P)

One of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy 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, 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. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

"The Government Inspector" and Other Russian Plays (Penguin Classics)

Denis Fonvizin

Alexander Griboyedov

Александр Николаевич Островский

Penguin??Books

Hailed universally as Russia's finest comic writer, and by many as its greatest writer of prose, Nikolai creates a unique Ukranian world, from the darkest Gothic to folkloric levity. Here, this extraordinary countryside is revealed in all its variety in his first two collections of short stories. The only translation available of this cycle of stories, this edition captures fully the spirit and vigor of his important early work for the first time.

Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Mirgorod (Oxford World's Classics)

Oxford Paperbacks

Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature. It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "an extraordinarily fine piece of work" and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol's original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier drafts of Dead Souls. The text is accompanied by Susanne Fusso's introduction and by appendices that present excerpts from Guerney's translations of other drafts of Gogol's work and letters Gogol wrote around the time of the writing and publication of Deal Souls.
"I am delighted that Guerney's translation of Dead Souls [is] available again. It is head and shoulders above all the others, for Guerney understands that to 'translate' Gogol is necessarily to undertake a poetic recreation, and he does so brilliantly."―Robert A. Maguire, Columbia University
"The Guerney translation of Dead Souls is the only translation I know of that makes any serious attempt to approximate the qualities of Gogol's style―exuberant, erratic, 'Baroque,' bizarre."―Hugh McLean, University of California, Berkeley
"A splendidly revised and edited edition of Bernard Guerney's classic English translation of Gogol's Dead Souls. The distinguished Gogol scholar Susanne Fusso may have brought us as close as the English reader may ever expect to come to Gogol's masterpiece. No student, scholar, or general reader will want to miss this updated, refined version of one of the most delightful and sublime works of Russian literature."―Robert Jackson, Yale University

Humor & Satire

Yale University Press

Inspector General

Dramas & Plays

Natl Textbook Co Trade

Part I of Dead Souls was published in 1842. Part II of Dead Souls exists only in fragments. The novel belongs to the great unfinished works of world literature (such as The Aeneid) whose incompletion bothers us very little. A few factual points ought to be explained to the reader, even though the novel itself eventually suffices to clarify some of them. First, the title of the book. Among Russian serf-owning gentry, the idiomatic way to assess someone’s wealth was to express it in terms of the number of “souls” he owned―that is, male, adult serfs. Taxes on serfs had to be paid by the owner until the next census or registration date even if they may have died in the meantime. Gogol’s “dead souls,” in addition to this literal reference to serfs who had died since the last registration date for serfs, are also a metaphor for the dead moral and spiritual sensibilities of the many inhabitants of Gogol’s zoo. This title ran into trouble with Gogol’s censors, who held the ridiculous suspicion that the title might be a blasphemous attack on the immortality of the human soul. Gogol therefore added the title “Chichikov’s Adventures.”

Dead Souls (Norton Library (Paperback)) (N600)

W.W.Norton&Company

Part I of Dead Souls was published in 1842. Part II of Dead Souls exists only in fragments. The novel belongs to the great unfinished works of world literature (such as The Aeneid) whose incompletion bothers us very little. A few factual points ought to be explained to the reader, even though the novel itself eventually suffices to clarify some of them. First, the title of the book. Among Russian serf-owning gentry, the idiomatic way to assess someone’s wealth was to express it in terms of the number of “souls” he owned―that is, male, adult serfs. Taxes on serfs had to be paid by the owner until the next census or registration date even if they may have died in the meantime. Gogol’s “dead souls,” in addition to this literal reference to serfs who had died since the last registration date for serfs, are also a metaphor for the dead moral and spiritual sensibilities of the many inhabitants of Gogol’s zoo. This title ran into trouble with Gogol’s censors, who held the ridiculous suspicion that the title might be a blasphemous attack on the immortality of the human soul. Gogol therefore added the title “Chichikov’s Adventures.”

Dead Souls: Background & Sources Essays in Criticism

Reference

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