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.Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer. Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogols work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism and the grotesque (The Nose, Viy, The Overcoat, Nevsky Prospekt). His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore. His later writing satirised political corruption in the Russian Empire (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls), leading to his eventual exile. The novel Taras Bulba and the play Marriage, along with the short stories Diary of a Madman, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, The Portrait and The Carriage, round out the tally of his best-known works.
