Dead Souls

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol
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Categorii:
Clasici
Limba:
Engleza
Data publicarii:
2010
Editura:
Tip coperta:
Paperback
Nr. pagini:
496
Colectie:
Traducatori:
ISBN:
9781840226379
Dimensiuni: l: 12.3cm | H: 19.3cm
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Descriere

This Wordsworth Edition includes an exclusive Introduction by Anthony Briggs.

Russia in the 1840s. There is a stranger in town, and he is behaving oddly. The unctuous Pavel Chichikov goes around the local estates buying up 'dead souls'.

These are the papers relating to serfs who have died since the last census, but who remain on the record and still attract a tax demand. Chichikov is willing to relieve their owners of the tax burden by buying the titles for a song. What he does not say is that he then proposes to take out a huge mortgage against these fictitious citizens and buy himself a nice estate in Eastern Russia. Will he get away with it? Who will rumble him? Does this narrative contain a deeper message about Russia itself or the spiritual health of humanity? There is much interest and some suspense in considering these issues, but the real pleasure of this story lies elsewhere. It is an enjoyable comic romp through a retarded part of a backward country, a picaresque series of grotesque portraits, situations and conversations described with Gogolian humour based mainly on hyperbole. This is, quite simply, the funniest book in the Russian language before the twentieth century.
Recenzii și comentarii

Nota 10

de Marina-Cristiana Stan | 26/09/2019 14:57

In Gogol’s time, a Russian landowner could buy and sell serfs, or “souls,” like any other property. The serfs were counted, for the purpose of tax assessment, every ten years. Thus, a landowner still had to pay taxes on the value of serfs who had died, until the next ten-year census could legally record the deaths. In Dead Souls, a prose novel subtitled A Poem, Gogol’s hero, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, plans to buy the titles to these “dead souls” and use them as collateral to obtain a large loan. He comes to a small provincial town and begins to proposition the local landowners: the slothful Manilovs (the “kind-manners”), the slovenly Plewshkin (“Mr. Spitoon”), the coarse Sobakievich (“Mr. Dog”), the cautious Madame Korobachka (“Mrs. Box”), and the bully and cheat Nozdryov (“Mr. Nostrils”). These landowners are revealed to be so petty and avaricious that not even Chichikov’s amazing offer can be worked to his advantage on them. Some stall, some refuse for no obvious reasons, some promise and then renege, and others want “in on the deal.” In the end, Chichikov, having concluded that the landowners are a hopeless lot, leaves for other regions. Throughout Dead Souls, Gogol presents Russian life as a mosaic of strangely intersecting inanities. He makes his authorial presence felt as a first-person commentator. His commentator’s stance is curiously unresolved. Though he likens Russia to the “fastest troika imaginable...racing headlong...inspired by God,” he seems most insistent, with his wordy, tongue-in-cheek prose, in portraying the life within its borders as inalterably superficial.
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