![]() ![]() Fyodor Dostoevsky translated and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa. Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is the great comic masterpiece of Russian literaturea satirical and splendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces. He had an intimate knowledge of such unliterary subjects as card games, tailoring and cuisine: his descriptions of clothes and food are as arousing as any pornographer’s descriptions of sex. Book recommendations for people who like Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Not only does he garner vocabulary from the backwoods of his country and from his own Lewis Carroll-like fantasy, but he spins sentences so ingeniously that the most absurd imagery and fanciful chains of thought are tightly bound by impeccably controlled syntax. Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. Of all classic Russian writers he is also the most challenging to translate. ![]() Shrewd observer, Romantic dreamer, idiot savant, parodist, or a comic Dante, Gogol still eludes all categories. Dead Souls, three fine comedies, and a score of stories, of which a dozen – such as The Nose, The Diary of a Madman and The Overcoat – begot the Russian novel and have left their mark on all Europe, were produced in ten years by one of the most unfathomable minds and most spellbinding narrators in literary history. In 1829, at the age of twenty, Nikolai Gogol found his voice as ‘Rudi Panko, beekeeper’ just over a decade later, his genius was drowned by other voices in his head, convincing him that he was an instrument of God. ![]()
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