Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is an undisputed masterpiece of world literature. The tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con who establishes a thriving trade in “dead souls”—serfs who though no longer alive can still, he finds, be profitably sold—is at the same time a brilliant spoof of a corrupt society, full of the living dead. Most important, however, Gogol’s great novel is a sheer delight, a book spilling over with humor and passion and absurdity, and fed by an unflagging stream of stylistic invention. At once a phantasmagoria and a work of careful, if not a little mind-boggling, realism, Dead Souls is a supremely living work of art.
