Pavel Chichikov arrives in a provincial Russian town with an ingenious proposal: he will purchase the names of serfs who have died since the last census but remain legally recorded as property.

These “dead souls” can then be used as collateral, allowing him to manufacture wealth from people who no longer exist. His scheme carries him from estate to estate through a procession of landowners, officials, gamblers, bores and minor tyrants, each rendered with Gogol’s grotesque comic precision.

First published in Russian in 1842, Dead Souls is at once a social satire, a picaresque journey and an unfinished attempt to write an epic of Russia. Gogol exposes a society in which bureaucracy converts human life into inventory, while nearly everyone conspires in the fiction because it serves some smaller appetite. The novel’s digressions, sudden addresses to the reader and unstable movement between farce and moral terror are central to its force. Translated by David Magarshack, this is for readers drawn to comic monstrosity, compromised tricksters and systems so absurd that they begin to resemble metaphysics.

Penguin Classics, twenty-second printing of the 1961 edition. Paperback, translated by David Magarshack. Cover creasing, rubbing and edge wear; pages lightly age-toned.