Con-man Chichikov travels through the country, buying from their masters the 'dead souls' of serfs who have passed away in the real world but are officially still alive until the next census. Since, in 19th century Russia, wealth is measured by the number of serfs as much as by the amount of land an individual owns, Chichikov is soon, in theory, one of the richest men in the country. Around this farcical story, Gogol constructs a wide-ranging, satirical panorama of Russian society in his day, rich in comic episodes and picaresque adventure. The black and paradoxical humor of Dead Souls is typical of Gogol's work and can seem curiously modern and ahead of its time. It is also much in evidence in his play The Government Inspector and in the short stories he wrote throughout his career. In one story ('The Nose') a nose takes on a malign life of its own, independent of its possessor's will; in another ('The Overcoat') a man saves for years to buy a new coat, only to be mugged and robbed the first time he wears it. Gogol's comedy mutates easily into something dark and disturbing as it does, most notably, in 'Diary of a Madman' which records, in his own words, the descent into insanity of a petty civil servant, gradually convinced that he is the heir to the throne of Spain. Gogol's own mental health was itself unstable. In his last years he became intensely and morbidly religious and his death is thought to have been brought on by the fasting and mortification he inflicted on his body. Before his death he burned the manuscript of a further part of Dead Souls, on which he had been working for years, because he had decided it was sinful, but the original work lives on as one of the classics of 19th-century Russian fiction.

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