isanovelfirstpublishedin1842. Itfollows Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a mysterious gentleman who arrives in a small Russian town with a peculiarscheme: topurchase"deadsouls"-serfs who have died but still exist on paper for tax purposes. As he charms local officials and landowners, his bizarre transactions raise suspicions. Through absurdsatire, GogolexposesthemoralrotandsocialdysfunctionofRussia's middle aristocracy, creating unforgettable caricatures of greed, pretension, and vulgarity why do I so persistently paint the poverty, the imperfections of Russian life, and delve into the remotest depths, the most retired holes and cor ners, of our Empireformysubjects? Theansweristhatthereisnothingelse to be done when an author's idiosyncrasy happens to incline him that way. So again we find ourselves in a retired spot. But what a spot! Imagine, if you can, a mountain range like a gigantic fortress, with embra suresandbastionswhichappeartosoarathousandverststowardstheheights of heaven, and, toweringgrandly overaboundlessexpanseofplain, arebro ken up into precipitous, overhanging limestone cliffs. Here and there those cliffs are seamed with water-courses and gullies, while at other points they are rounded off into spurs of green-spurs now coated with fleece-like tufts of young undergrowth, now studded with the stumps of felled trees, now covered with timber which has, by some miracle, escaped the woodman's axe. Also, a river winds awhile between its banks, then leaves the meadow land, divides intorunlets(all flashing in the sunlikefire), plunges, re-united, into the midst of a thicket of elder, birch, and pine, and, lastly, speeds tri umphantly past bridges and mills and weirs which seem to be lying in wait for it at every turn
