Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls, Volume One
1922 · 326 pages
- Author
- Nikolai Gogol
- Edition
- The Works of Nikolay Gogol, I: Dead Souls, a Poem, Volume One (Book One, Chapters I–IX); translated by Constance Garnett
- Published
- London, Chatto & Windus, 1922
- Pages
- 326
- File
- DjVu, 4.3 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
Dead Souls is Nikolai Gogol’s great comic novel, published in 1842. He called it a poem in prose. Its hero, the smooth and polite Pavel Chichikov, drives from estate to estate buying up “dead souls”: serfs who have died since the last census but still count as living on paper, and whom he means to pawn as if they were real. Each landowner he calls on — the sugary Manilov, the suspicious widow Korobochka, the brawling Nozdryov, the bear-like Sobakevich and the miser Plyushkin — is a portrait that Russians still quote.
Behind the comedy lies a bleak picture of provincial Russia, its officials and its serf economy, and the book shaped much of the Russian prose that followed. Gogol meant to add two more parts but burned most of the second before his death in 1852.
Constance Garnett’s translation, published in 1922 as the first volume of her Works of Nikolay Gogol, became one of the best-known English versions of the novel. This volume holds chapters I–IX of Book One.
Contents
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About this edition
First volume of Constance Garnett’s translation of Dead Souls, published in London by Chatto & Windus in 1922 as volume I of The Works of Nikolay Gogol, and printed by T. and A. Constable at the Edinburgh University Press. It contains a short translator’s note on Gogol’s life and chapters I to IX of Book One; the remaining chapters of Book One and the surviving parts of Book Two are in the second volume. The scan, with library marks on the title page, has a searchable text layer, and its text has been proofread on Wikisource.
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.