About the book:
Gogols brilliant, darkly comic masterpiece about the scheming Chichikov, who travels rural Russia buying up the names of dead serfs in a bizarre get-rich-quick scheme.
A savage satire on greed, bureaucracy, and the absurdities of Russian society, blending humor, grotesquerie, and profound social insight.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Missing dust cover.
Some wear to cover.
Well bound and clean pages.
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About the author:
Nikolai Gogol (1809 to 1852)
Born in Sorochyntsi in the Ukrainian countryside (then part of the Russian Empire), Gogol came from a family steeped in local culturehis father was an amateur playwright who staged comic works in Ukrainian. This rural, Cossack-influenced world of folklore, superstition, and earthy humor would remain a deep wellspring for his imagination even after he moved to St. Petersburg as a young man in 1828, determined to make his name in Russian letters.
His early success arrived with the story collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (18311832), which blended Ukrainian folklore, the supernatural, and sly comedy. Over the next two decades he developed a singular voice that fused sharp social satire, grotesque exaggeration, and surreal fantasyoften within the same story. Gogol saw the novel and tale not merely as entertainment but as a mirror held up to Russian societys absurdities, bureaucratic tyranny, and spiritual emptiness. His mature style hovers between realism and nightmare, laughter and horror, the mundane and the phantasmagoric.
Deeply influenced by Ukrainian oral tradition and the mentorship of Alexander Pushkin, Gogol in turn became one of the foundational figures of Russian literature. Dostoevsky famously declared that we all came out from under Gogols Overcoat, while his impact ripples through later writers from Chekhov to Bulgakov, Nabokov, and the entire tradition of the grotesque and absurdist novel.
Recurring preoccupations include the pettiness of human vanity, the deadening weight of bureaucracy, the gap between illusion and reality, and the quiet desperation of the little man. Works like The Nose and The Overcoat turn the absurd into profound comedy; The Government Inspector remains one of the most devastating satires on official corruption ever written; and his masterpiece Dead Souls (1842) offers an epic portrait of a Russia populated by grotesques and schemers.
His final years were darkened by illness, religious mania, and a tormented relationship with his own talenthe famously burned the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls shortly before his death in Moscow in 1852.
Gogols influence on world literature is immense: he helped invent the modern short story and the satirical novel while remaining utterly unique in his mixture of laughter, pity, and existential unease.
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