Dead Souls

Summary

«Dead Souls» is a poem by Nikolai Gogol, in which the author paints a broad social picture of early 19th-century Russia through the narrative of the main character, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, traveling through the Russian countryside. Chichikov visits landowners with an unusual goal—to buy dead souls, that is, serfs who have died but are still officially listed as alive in the census records, for the purpose of fraud and obtaining loans against their collateral. The variety of landowners' characters that Chichikov encounters, their vices, weaknesses, and few virtues reveal a multifaceted image of Russian reality at that time. Although Gogol intended the project «Dead Souls» to be a trilogy, the first volume was published in 1842 and remained the only completed one, despite the author's attempts to write a continuation.