Audiobook · read by volunteers
Dead Souls
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852)
Read by David Barnes, Figura, Topaz, Tysto, hefyd, Julie Levi, Euan Bayliss, gmiteva, Anna Simon, Great Plains · 27 chapters · 14 h 43
About the book
Pavel Chichikov arrives in a provincial Russian town with a curious plan. Serfs who have died since the last census still count officially as living property, and he intends to buy up such dead souls cheaply, then use them as collateral for a fortune. He visits one landowner after another, and each is a masterpiece of comic portraiture: the flatterer, the miser, the boaster, the dreamer. Beneath the humour lies a sharp portrait of a society built on greed, vanity and self-deception. Nikolai Gogol called his book an epic poem in prose, and it is among the foundations of Russian literature. In this English translation by C. J. Hogarth, its satire, energy and strangeness come through, making it one of the great comic novels of the nineteenth century. It is satire at its most inventive and humane.
Introduction
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) was a Russian writer born in Ukraine, famous for his plays, stories and this novel. Dead Souls was first published in 1842 and is regarded as one of the most important works of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Gogol planned it as the first part of a three-part work, in the manner of a modern Divine Comedy, but he never completed the later sections.
C. J. Hogarth (1869–1945) produced the English translation recorded here. The recording includes an introduction by John Cournos and the author’s preface, then the eleven chapters of Part I, some of them divided into sections, and the surviving chapters of Part II. The structure resembles a journey in which Chichikov calls on a succession of landowners. Gogol’s humour depends on exaggeration and on small, telling details, and it has the power to make the reader laugh and shudder at the same time.
Gogol’s comedy depends on the contrast between Chichikov’s smooth manners and the absurd world around him. The landowners are unforgettable, and the narrator’s digressions on Russia, language and human nature add a poetic dimension. The planned continuation was never finished, and the surviving fragments of Part II are the nearest we have to it, a fact that adds to the book’s mystery and its place in literary history.
The 27 recordings, about 14.7 hours in all, are read by LibriVox volunteers, so Chichikov’s tour of the landowners passes from voice to voice. Gogol’s comedy lives in detail and tone, and it is well worth hearing a chapter at a time, so that each of the portraits has room to settle.
Public domain
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol died in 1852: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text