Dead Souls

Name: Dead Souls
Author: Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol · 1842

A swindler travels rural Russia buying "dead souls" (deceased serfs still listed in census rolls). Gogol's 1842 novel is simultaneously absurdist comedy and the darkest vision of Russian bureaucracy and provincial life. Nabokov called Gogol "the greatest prose magician of Russian literature."

The case against

on the digressions
“elegies to highways and the weather”
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on the patronymic Ivanovich
“they all didn’t have the patronymic ‘Ivanovich’”
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on the physical descriptions
“goes on and on about the physical environments”
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on the second part
“had a hard time with the more sanctimonious side of the second part”
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