Dead Souls

Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842 and widely regarded as an exemplar of nineteenth-century Russian literature. It chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people he encounters, who typify the Russian middle aristocracy of the time; Gogol himself described it as an epic poem in prose, and intended it as the first part of a three-volume work, but burned the manuscript of the second part shortly before his death. The novel, which ends in mid-sentence yet is regarded by some as complete in its extant form, is a satire of nineteenth-century Russian bureaucracy.