Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

Entering any town, even though it be a capital, is always a bleak affair; at first everything is drab and monotonous: one comes upon factories and workshops without number, all blackened with smoke, and only thereafter will one glimpse the angles of six-story houses, and shops, and signs, and streets with tremendous perspectives consisting entirely of belfries, columns, statues, towers, with all of a city’s glitter, din, and thunder, and everything that the hand and mind of man have brought forth for man to wonder at. How the first acquisitions were consummated the reader has already seen; how the affair will go on in the future, what the fortunes and misfortunes of our hero will be, how he will have to resolve and overcome still greater obstacles in store for him, how colossal figures will appear, how the hidden levers of a far-flung narrative will move, while its horizon widens still further and it adopts a majestic lyrical flow, these things the reader will see later on. There is still a long road lying ahead of this whole nomadic outfit consisting of one gentleman of middle age, a light carriage of the sort that bachelors prefer to drive about in, Petrushka the flunky, Selifan the coachman, and the trio of horses, which the reader is now familiar with by name, from Assessor to that scoundrel of a piebald.