Dead Souls in Never too Late to Read Classics

Sep 20, 2020 Chrissie rated it liked it

Shelves: humor, 2020-read, audible-uk, russia, classics, hf

Honestly, I like this book, but not a whole lot, so I have settled on three rather than four stars.

I like the satirical humor—it isn’t nasty, it makes you laugh.

The prose doesn’t feel dated; it’s easy to follow. Constance Garnett is the translator.

I like very much the descriptions of people and places—the writing is lyrical in parts. Reading this, you get a strong sense of time and place—provincial Russia in the first half of the 19th century. The emancipation of the serfs had yet to take place; Honestly, I like this book, but not a whole lot, so I have settled on three rather than four stars.

I like the satirical humor—it isn’t nasty, it makes you laugh.

The prose doesn’t feel dated; it’s easy to follow. Constance Garnett is the translator.

I like very much the descriptions of people and places—the writing is lyrical in parts. Reading this, you get a strong sense of time and place—provincial Russia in the first half of the 19th century. The emancipation of the serfs had yet to take place; the emancipation reform began in 1861. Prior to this, serfs were landowners’ property—they could be bought, sold, even mortgaged. The purchase and then mortgaging of serfs is what the central character is up to in this tale. Serfs who had died, still registered in the last census, are what he buys. When he buys them, previous owners need no long pay taxes for them and so he is hoping to get them really cheap or for nothing. With these dead serfs in his possession he can get money by mortgaging them at a bank. We observe how the landowners / serf owners behave. Some, cognizant of the demand for the serfs, set a high price on them. The eponymous “dead souls” has two meanings—the dead serfs and the dead souls of egotistical, selfish, avaricious landowners. The book is a criticism of the Russian middleclass.

The large number of characters and the Russian names gave me some trouble. I mixed up characters now and then. I think it is harder to listen to this than to read it. You don’t pick the book up for character portrayal. Characters are as silhouettes: they represent different types of people. I do like that the central character is not drawn as a shining hero.

The book reads as a string of episodes, which makes it disjointed. It is debated if it was fully completed. Sections of the manuscript are missing, and the ending is abrupt, in fact it stops in the middle of a sentence.

I am definitely glad to have read this. It is a classic not to be missed. The descriptive writing is better than good. The humor is topnotch. I like very much that the message conveyed is delivered through humor rather than by means of a dry, didactic sermon. On the minus side, the plot doesn’t hold together properly, goes off in different directions and should have been tightened.

Nicholas Boulton narrates wonderfully. The narration is clear and read at a good speed. He uses different intonations for different characters, and he does this well, without excessive exaggeration. His pronunciation of a character’s name is not varied, this does help one recognize them. That two characters have similarly sounding names is what gave me the most trouble. This is not the narrator’s fault! Five stars for the audio narration. ...more

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Jan 30, 2010 Laura rated it really liked it

Shelves: 1001-books-you-must-read-before-you, hf-19th-century-europe, 3ms, read-2010, nyrb-classics, 1000-guardian, russian-fiction, audio-books

Excellent, magnificent piece of work!!

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.

Free audiobook is available at LibriVox ...more

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Aug 24, 2015 Douglas Beagley rated it liked it

Gogol is great. He does some things that the other Russian authors couldn't quite get to. He doesn't tell compelling and unified long-form narratives, though, so he's never going to be as famous. ...more

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