Dead Souls

Gogol’s hilarious and scathing satire of Imperial Russia, freshly repackaged for the Union Square & Co. Signature Editions line.

Pavel Ivanovitch Tchitchikov, a mysterious and charming gentleman, arrives in a provincial Russian town with a curious business proposition. In a bid to build a new fortune, he plans to purchase the names of “dead souls”—serfs who have died since the last census but are still legally a landowner’s property.

As Tchitchikov travels the countryside, he encounters a gallery of eccentric, corrupt landowners, offering a grotesque and comic glimpse into the moral rot at the heart of Imperial Russia. A biting, lyrical, and darkly humorous epic, Dead Souls remains a timeless portrait of greed and spiritual decay.