Dead Souls — Nikolai Gogol | Reader’s Companion | Coleman’s Notes CN-062
What exactly is a “dead soul” — and why would anyone want to buy one?
Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov arrives in a provincial Russian town appearing respectable, courteous and financially comfortable. But behind his carefully constructed public image lies one of literature’s strangest schemes: he wants to purchase the names of serfs who have died but remain officially registered as living.
His journey takes him from estate to estate and introduces some of Gogol’s most memorable creations. Through Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdryov, Sobakevich and Plyushkin, Gogol builds an extraordinary comic portrait of a society dominated by property, bureaucracy, greed, vanity and self-deception.
Yet Dead Souls is much more than a social satire.
Gogol called the work a “poem”, and its narrator continually moves between farce, grotesque comedy, lyrical reflection and ambitious questions about Russia itself. Chichikov’s journey therefore becomes both an outrageous confidence scheme and a much larger exploration of what it means for a human being — or even a society — to possess a living or a dead soul.
Coleman’s Notes® CN-062 guides the reader through the complete eleven chapters of Part I and the surviving material from the unfinished Part II, while examining Gogol’s characters, narrative technique, historical setting, humour and moral concerns.
The companion explores serfdom and the revision lists, Chichikov’s methods, the five landowners, provincial society, bureaucracy, greed and corruption, the narrator, satire and irony, the grotesque, the road motif, the significance of the title and Gogol’s extraordinary vision of Russia.
Also included are Eight Extended Close Readings, historical and literary context, a Translation & Edition Guide, critical debates and interpretations, comparative and independent-study ideas, 50 Reading and Discussion Questions, ten key episodes, twenty key concepts and Quick Revision & Recall.
60 A5 pages
Digital Reader’s Companion — £7.95
Russian Literature Collection 2
A Hero of Our Time • Dead Souls • Eugene Onegin • The Bronze Horseman • The Master and Margarita • Doctor Zhivago
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Six separately: £47.70
Collection price: £42.95
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