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