Few literary works have been so variously interpreted as Nikolai Gogol’s enduring comic masterpiece, Dead Souls.This Norton Critical Edition reprints the text of the acclaimed George Reavey translation, which has been fully annotated for undergraduate readers.
The Text of Dead Souls
Backgrounds and Sources
A Chronology of Gogol’s Life
Gogol’s "Four Letters to Divers Persons Apropos Dead Souls"
From Gogol’s Letters
To A.S.Pushkin.October 7, 1835.
To V.A.Zhukovsky.November 12, 1836.
To S.T.Aksakov.December 28, 1840.
To P.A.Pletnev.January 7, 1842.
To N.Ya.Prokopovich.April 9, 1842.
To A.V.Nikitenko.April 10, 1842.
To A.S.Danilevsky.May 9, 1882.
To V.Zhukovsky.June 26, 1842.
Addressee unknown.About July 20, 1842.
To S.T.Aksakov.August 18/6, 1842.
To A.O.Smirnova.July 25, 1845.
To N.M.Yazykov.May 5, 1846.
Ranks in Tsarist Russia
Essays in Criticism
Robert A.Maguire, [The Legacy of Gogol Criticism]
V.G.Belinsky, Chichikov's Adventures, or Dead Souls: Gogol’s Epic Poem
Alexander I.Herzen, Diary Entries on Dead Souls
Donald Fanger, Dead Souls: The Mirror and the Road
Yuri Mann, On the Two Opposing Structural Principles of Dead Souls
V.V.Gippius, An Introduction to Dead Souls
Andrei Bely, The Figure of Fiction in Dead Souls
Vladimir Nabokov, Our Mr.Chichikov
Edmund Wilson, Gogol: The Demon in the Overgrown Garden
Simon Karlinsky, [Portrait of Gogol as a Word Glutton]
Dmitry Ci?evsky, Gogol: Artist and Thinker
Victor Shklovsky, The Literary Genre of Dead Souls
M.M.Bakhtin, Verbal Art and the Folk Culture of Laughter
Yuri M.Lotman, The Problem of Artistic Space in Gogol’s Prose
Selected Bibliography