Dead Souls

By: Nikolai Gogol, Richard Pevear - translator

Narrated by: Alan Turton

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"—deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them—we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.

This audiobook is expertly read by Alan Turton, with audio engineering by Raconteurs. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Recorded by arrangement with Pantheon Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

©1996 Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (P)2025 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC