The novel has a circular structure, following Chichikov as he visits the estates of landowners living around the capital of a guberniya. Although Gogol aspired to emulate the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy, many critics derive the structure of Dead Souls from the picaresque novels of the 16th and 17th centuries in that it is divided into a series of somewhat disjointed episodes, and the plot concerns a gentrified version of the rascal protagonist of the original picaresques. Low-level official Pavel Chichikov travels around a provincial city’s landowners and asks to sell to him their serfs… that have already died. All of them react differently. Pliushkin, with whom he negotiates next, is a miser. He buys one hundred twenty dead souls and seventy-eight fugitives after considerable haggling. Pliushkin gives him a letter to Ivan Grigorievitch, the town president.

So we are left with part one, some bits of part two and an outline of the three part whole of the work, the rest having gone up in smoke. Radio Liberty, transcript of a talk from cycle "Heroes of the Time", host:Петр Вайль, guests: culturologist Мариэтта Чудакова and actors Archil Gomiashvili (Bender-1971) and Sergey Yursky (Bender-1993)

Dead Souls ( Russian: «Мёртвые души» (pre-1918: Мертвыя души), Mjórtvyje dúshi) is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov (Russian: Павел Иванович Чичиков) and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle aristocracy of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an " epic poem in prose", and within the book characterised it as a " novel in verse". Gogol intended the novel to be the first part of a three-volume work, but burned the manuscript of the second part shortly before his death. [1] [2] Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne's Sentimental Journey), it is regarded by some as complete in the extant form. [3] Title [ edit ]

Pliushkin is the final person who Chichikov buys souls from. He is described as being greedy and cruel. The narrator says that when his wife was alive he was much more kind and generous. After her death, he became obsessed with money and treated his servants and children with suspicion and stinginess. Selifan Mirskij, Dmitrij Petrovič, A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900, ed. by Francis J. Whitfield (Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp. 160 Word gets around town about Chichikov's plan and people speculate about the possibility of Chichikov being very wealthy. Chichikov is invited to a ball and many women take an interest in him. He talks to the young woman he saw on the road and learns that she is the governor's daughter. Nozdriov arrives at the ball and begins screaming about Chichikov's schemes. After the ball, a rumor spreads that Chichikov is scheming to kidnap the governor's daughter. Suspicions about Chichikov mount and he is barred from entering a number of places. He learns that his name has been tarnished and leaves town.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. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol's original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier drafts of Dead Souls. The text is accompanied by Susanne Fusso's introduction and by appendices that present excerpts from Guerney's translations of other drafts of Gogol's work and letters Gogol wrote around the time of the writing and publication of Deal Souls. Era normal designar con el mote de "alma" al campesino que trabajaba para ellos y de esa manera, sus propietarios podían tener trabajando veinte, cien o quinientas almas en sus tierras. El proyecto de Chichikov es comprar esas almas haciendo un contrato de traspaso para después hacerlos figurar como propios en unas tierras que tiene pensado comprar en la ciudad de Kherson, un remoto pueblo perdido dentro del vasto suelo ruso. Petrushka the flunky…began settling himself in the tiny anteroom…whither he had already brought…a certain odor all his own, which had been also imparted to the bag he brought in next, containing sundry flunkyish effects. In 1831 Gogol published Evenings at the Farm of Dikanka, a collection of stories about Ukranian rural life, which was well received. At this time he met Pushkin, who admired his talent and encouraged his literary ambitions. His plan (never carried through) to write a history of the Ukraine won him a Chair of history at St Petersburg University, but it was an absurd appointment. He was entirely unsuited to an academic life and soon resigned. In the meantime he had published a new series of stories including Taras Bulba, a Homeric prose poem, and his famous story The Cloak, which has been recognised as the starting point for the Russian novel.