Dead Souls

  • Author Nikolai Gogol
  • Narrator Nicholas Boulton
  • Publisher Naxos AudioBooks
  • Run Time 14 hours and 55 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Classic fiction.
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What to expect

Gogol’s great Russian classic is the Pickwick Papers of Russian Literature. It takes a sharp but humorous look at life in all its strata, but especially the devious complexities in Russia with its landowners and serfs. We are introduced to Tchitchikov, a businessman who, in order to trick the tax authorities, buys up dead ‘souls’ or serfs whose names still appear on the government census. Despite being a dealer in phantom crimes and paper ghosts, he is the most beguiling of Gogol’s characters. Gogol’s obsession with attempting to display ‘the untold riches of the Russian soul’ eventually led him to madness, religious mania and death. Dismissed by him as merely ‘a pale introduction to the great epic poem which is taking shape in my mind’, Dead Souls is the culmination of Gogol’s genius.

Critics Review

Justly regarded as a seminal masterpiece of Russian literature, Gogol’s 1842 novel of an opportunistic schemer who tours the provinces drawing in his gullible countrymen by means of their own prejudices and pretensions has lost none of its trenchant force. Reader Boulton deftly navigates the playful digressions of a stylist who raised the run-on sentence to an art form, voicing Gogol’s omniscient, bemused, and often-perplexed narrator in a smooth, urbane baritone well suited to the elegant reserve of Constance Garnett’s 1922 translation. The episodic swindles of antihero Chichikov unveil a rogue’s gallery of folly, hubris and venality, and Boulton ably and with relish inhabits a varied cast of serfs, landowners, bureaucrats, generals, nobles, and even a horse. Listeners new to Dead Souls may be surprised by the fragmentary state of its second half, but more than enough satiric brilliance remains to make this unabridged recording a highly recommended purchase for most libraries.

David Wright, Booklist

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