Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dead Souls

Dead Souls

Reavey, George
Gogol, Nikolai
Gogol, Nikolai Vasil'evich

Paperback

Series: Norton Library (Paperback)

Classic FictionGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 039300600X
ISBN13: 9780393006001
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: Nov 1 1971
Pages: 478
Weight: 0.91
Height: 0.92 Width: 5.08 Depth: 7.69
Language: English
A few factual points ought to be explained to the reader, even though the novel itself eventually suffices to clarify some of them. First, the title of the book. Among Russian serf-owning gentry, the idiomatic way to assess someone's wealth was to express it in terms of the number of souls he owned--that is, male, adult serfs. Taxes on serfs had to be paid by the owner until the next census or registration date even if they may have died in the meantime. Gogol's dead souls, in addition to this literal reference to serfs who had died since the last registration date for serfs, are also a metaphor for the dead moral and spiritual sensibilities of the many inhabitants of Gogol's zoo. This title ran into trouble with Gogol's censors, who held the ridiculous suspicion that the title might be a blasphemous attack on the immortality of the human soul. Gogol therefore added the title Chichikov's Adventures.

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