The elusive 'Russian spirit' is on every page. It has all the wit and linguistic dexterity of Dickens, and still is utterly and completely Russian. It's only fair to close by saying I've downloaded dozens of Audible titles over the years, and this is the first time I've had grounds for complaint. This has since been revised, but further adds to the unreliability of the Audible marketers when it comes to disclosing to the customer exactly what they're getting. When I initially download the book two weeks ago, the thumbnail they used was of the Vintage Classics edition, translated by the great Pevear and Volokhonsky. Given all the unemployed Ph.Ds out there, the company should consider hiring experts in specific fields of literature as editors to ensure this type of false advertisement doesn't happen again. I am deeply annoyed at the Audible editors who didn't take the time to realize this.

These excisions allow the plot to lurch forward more briskly, but Gogol has much more to offer than plot. The edited text is missing somewhere between 8-10% of Gogol's prose, mostly big chunks of descriptive exposition and digressive ruminations on the writer's life as it relates to Russian society. But this is NOT an Unabridged reading of Dead Souls. On another level, the title refers to the 'dead souls' of Gogol's characters, all of which visualise different aspects of poshlost (an untranslatable Russian word which is perhaps best rendered as 'self-satisfied inferiority', moral and spiritual, with overtones of middle-class pretentiousness, fake significance, and philistinism).Firstly, this is a serviceable translation of Gogol's masterwork, and narrator Tom Weiner does a better than average job of bringing the novel to life (though somehow his imperious tone doesn't quite suit the text).

The plot of the novel relies on 'dead souls' (i.e., 'dead serfs') which are still accounted for in property registers. To count serfs (and people in general), the measure word 'soul' was used: e.g., 'six souls of serfs'.

Serfs were for most purposes considered the property of the landowner, and could be bought, sold, or mortgaged against, as any other chattel. In Russia before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, landowners were entitled to own serfs to farm their land. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne's Sentimental Journey), it is usually regarded as complete in the extant form. Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol destroyed it shortly before his death. Gogol himself saw it as an 'epic poem in prose', and within the book as a 'novel in verse'. Download cover art Download CD case insert Dead Soulsĭead Souls (Russian: Мёртвые души) by Nikolai Gogol, Russian writer, was first published in 1842, and is one of the most prominent works of 19th-century Russian literature.

Dead souls nikolai