Publisher's Synopsis
A stranger arrives in a Russian backwater community with a bizarre proposition for the local landowners: cash for their 'dead souls, ' the serfs who have died in their service. A comic masterpiece. Dead Souls is eloquent on some occasions, lyrical on others, and pious and reverent elsewhere. Nicolai Gogol was a master of the spoof. The American students of today are not the only readers who have been confused by him. Russian literary history records more divergent interpretations of Gogol than perhaps of any other classic
