Book Detective

Dead Souls is eloquent on some occasions, lyrical on others, and pious and reverent elsewhere. Nicolai Gogol was a master of the spoof. The American students of today are not the only readers who have been confused by him. Russian literary history records more divergent interpretations of Gogol than perhaps of any other classic.

In a new translation of the comic classic of Russian literature, Chichikov, an enigmatic stranger and conniving schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from their landlords' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit and to reinvent himself as a likeable gentleman.

Mirgorod by Nikolai Gogol

Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

First Love by Ivan Turgenev

The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

On the Eve by Ivan Turgenev

Virgin Soil by Ivan Turgenev

Rudin by Ivan Turgenev

The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol