He has translated works by Chekhov and Gogol. Book enhanced with curriculum aligned questions and activities. He has written extensively on Russian and Georgian literature and on Stalin and the secret police. Read Dead Souls by Gogol, Nikolai, lexile & reading level:, (ISBN: 9781443435468). Buy Dead Souls (Classic Edition) by Nikolai Gogol from Waterstones today Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders. Translated and annotated by Donald Rayfiled, Emeritus Professor of Russian at Queen Mary University of London.

Its unflinching and remorseless depiction of venality in Russian society is a lasting tribute to Gogol’s comic genius. It is not clear what Chichikov’s intentions are with the dead serfs he is purchasing, and despite his attempts to ingratiate himself, his strange behaviour arouses the suspicions of everyone in the town.Ī biting satire of social pretensions and pomposity, Dead Souls has been revered since its original publication in 1842 as one of the funniest and most brilliant novels of nineteenth-century Russia. He offers to buy the rights to the dead serfs who are still registered on the landowner’s estate, thus reducing their liability for taxes. Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature.It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as 'an extraordinarily fine piece of work' and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town and proceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual and somewhat macabre proposition.

Nikolai dead souls