Customer Reviews

Dead Souls

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Robert Maguire's translation of _Dead Souls_ is the best one out on the market right now. It is even superior to that of the superstar Russian novel translation-duo Pevear & Volkhonsky (their translation, however, is also worth purchasing, as well as all of their other ones). Robert Maguire was a Gogol specialist and had an intimate understanding of this particular work.

This is considered one of the great works of Russian Literature. The ambitious Chichikov schemes to buy up the 'dead souls'( The names of serfs who have died since the last census and are not listed officially as dead) from their previous owners. In doing so he hopes to establish himself as the owner of many ' souls' and by pawning the souls become a wealthy man.
In doing this he travels through Russia meeting a variety of odd and interesting characters. One character,Manilov gives his souls free of charge. Another the greedy Korobotchka makes a bargain of fifteen rubles per soul. Sobakevitch demands a hundred rubles but his rudeness gets him only two- and - one half rubles per soul.
Chichikov pulls it off for a time, is recognized as wealthy, has many ladies running after him, but is last exposed by a character, Nozdrev, who has refused to make a bargain with him.
Gogol's fiercely satirical humor has made this work a Russian reader's delight.
I am not sure however that the humor and the delight translate very well to English.

I found "Dead Souls" through the Amazon search and clicked on the hardbound Maguire translation. The 6 customer reviews extoled the Maguire version as one of the better ones. The webpage also mentioned a Kindle version and included a link. I clicked the link. The same customer reviews appeared as for the hardbound version. There was no contradicting information about the translator, so I bought expecting the Kindle version of the Maguire translations. When I opened the Kindle version, I was surprised to see credits for translation by D.J. Hogarth. This difference should be made clear, especially when the reviews on the same page extol the Maguire version and you don't get that translation.

The reason this is the best translation is that Maguire is an authority on Gogol and this work. He provides the most thorough footnotes for a work I have come across and explains all the Russian nuances. We read this for an IB class in which several native Russian speakers were included. They commented on how Maguire was able to maintain the quality and nuances of the language and satire in translation -- a very difficult task. Our local (Kyiv, Ukraine) book group of mostly American adults used the same translation and also loved it. The book makes for interesting discussion. Also read The Inspector General if you get a chance!

Among all humans, the sub-set of famous writers surely has a disproportionate share of strange birds, and one of the oddest was Nicolai Gogol. Born in the Ukraine in 1809, as a young man he re-located to Petersburg, intent on making a name for himself. When he discovered that the civil service was closed to him, he sought to make his fame as a writer - and he did. Today, his works, collectively, are generally regarded to be a brilliant critique of czarist Russia, exposing the inefficiencies and injustices of the czarist bureaucracy, the decadence and hypocrisy of the aristocracy and landowners, and the misery of all other Russians. Yet, curiously, Gogol was a political conservative who endorsed the existing order, including serfdom. By his lights, improvement in the average person's quality of life was primarily the responsibility of the individual, through education and religion. Gogol himself became consumed with a sort of religious mania. He became increasingly ascetic and he died in a state of delirium, just shy of 43 years of age; the immediate cause probably was self-starvation. The general consensus is that he also died a virgin; in the recesses of academia there is persistent speculation that he was a repressed homosexual. And it is generally accepted that he was a lifelong manic-depressive.

Gogol's greatest works are his short stories - including "Nevsky Prospect", "The Overcoat", and "Diary of a Madman". DEAD SOULS is his one novel of note, and for some it is on a par with the best of his short stories. For various reasons, I don't regard DEAD SOULS quite that highly.

First, it is unfinished. Part I (280 pages in this edition) was published in 1842. Gogol reportedly likened it to "Inferno" of Dante's "Divine Comedy". Off and on over the next ten years he worked on Part II, which was to be the counterpart to "Purgatory", but several times he condemned his manuscript to the flames, including just before he took to his deathbed. What now exists as Part II (150 pages in this edition) consists of an early manuscript, itself incomplete, that accidentally survived. Not only is it incomplete, it is, in my opinion, not of the same literary quality as Part I.

Inasmuch as Gogol never was satisfied with any portion of Part II, I am inclined to ignore it in assessing the novel. But what about Part I? The underlying conceit of the novel is inspired: a relatively minor Russian functionary, Chichikov, stumbles on the scam of acquiring (on paper or in name only) deceased serfs, whom landowners presumably are willing to give away or sell cheaply so that they will not have to continue to pay taxes on them until the next census is conducted, and then mortgaging those dead souls to the government for hundreds of thousands of rubles. Part I tells of Chichikov's efforts to implement his scheme in the unnamed capital of a Russian province. Much of the writing is also brilliant. The novel features a variety of different, and highly modern, writing styles and techniques. Frequently Gogol steps back from the story itself and talks directly to the reader, at times seriously and other times facetiously. The descriptions range from the highly realistic (often in minute detail), to the poetic, to the exaggerated. Often the novel is wildly funny and often it is sharply satiric. I understand that the original Russian abounds with witty plays on words. (A plus of this edition is the translator's detailed footnotes, some of which seek to explain Gogol's inventive wordplay to the English reader.)

But for me the conceit of the novel becomes old. And it is too episodic in nature. Like its predecessors among the great Russian novels - Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" and Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time" - DEAD SOULS consists essentially of separate stories that are strung together to make up a so-called novel. For example, Chapters Two through Six of Part I each consists of Chichikov's efforts to wheedle out of a different landowner his/her dead peasants. As discrete stories they would be more entertaining than they are strung together seriatim. Further, Gogol's numerous asides to the reader, with time, began to wear on me.

There is no question but that DEAD SOULS is a landmark in Russian literature. And there is no question that it is remarkably modern for fiction written 170 years ago. But for this 20th-Century reader who has managed to survive into the 21st Century, it does not provide quite the level of pleasure or gravitas to merit five stars.

i bought this for my Kindle in April, 2009. Unfortunately, this version is incomplete - the electronic version ends abruptly about 1/3 of the way through. I followed up with Kindle Support. They encountered the same problem.

The Russian author, Nikolai Gogol (1809 -1852), was a name vaguely familiar to me, and as part of my years'-long project of reading notable authors whom I had never read, I decided to read his best-known work, Dead Souls (1842). Dead Souls is considered a major work of 19th century Russian literature. Still, it's a strange book from an even stranger author. Gogol destroyed part two of the book shortly before his death, and Dead Souls ends in mid-sentence, with the plot unresolved.

Because of their fame, information and critical studies about Gogol and Dead Souls are widely available. As for me, I enjoyed reading the book because its absurd characters and ridiculous plot were interesting and highly entertaining as satire and comedy. Most of all, Gogol's ability to take and thoroughly absorb me into the world of 19th century Russian provincial life, a time when serfs were still property, did for me what I expect from good literature, that is, to create an imaginary world in which I participate.

Having worked my way slowly through a handful of Russian classics (Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Gorky, Nabokov), I naively based my expectations of Gogol on a stereotype aggregated from these literary giants- profound insight into human nature amplified by the trials of an oppressed society. There's certainly no lack of keen insight into human nature in this satire about an ambitious but landless citizen's ambition to marry the governor's daughter by playing a loophole in the system to build his status. Gogol captures both the mundane swirl of gossip and speculation surrounding the first rumors that the protagonist is buying dead souls at low cost, as well as the profound sense that mankind has "succeeded again and again in losing themselves in back alleys in broad daylight... trudging wearily after a mirage." What distinguishes Gogol is his comic genius in the absurd details of his descriptions and dialogue. Character traits are surely exaggerated, but strangely convincing. One prospective seller tries to include a German barrel organ or hounds in the deal for dead souls ("Barrel ribs beyond imagination, paws so padded that they don't even leave a mark on the ground!"). Another mocks his persistence ("Like a parrot, you keep answering the same thing to whatever you're told- two rubles- two rubles..."). Two characters are deadlocked at a doorway for a good ten minutes, each trying to be deferential to let the other pass first. Even the importance of food is never overlooked ("the pie was very good in its own right, and now, after all the trouble he had with the old woman, it tasted even better"). Great book.

my review is limited to the kindle version of the penguin edition. there is a map in this version which i cannot read on my kindle 3 even with the zoom feature. the notes are at the end of the book rather than at the bottom of the page. the glossary is at the end of the book and not integrated with the dictionary feature of the kindle. using the notes and glossary are very cumbersome. for readers who find maps, notes and glossaries an important part of reading a book, i suggest buying a different version of the book.

he most interesting feature of this book, in my opinion, is its special type of satirical language, mastered by Gogol and very much in chemistry with the story. He is able to depict the most inner parts of his characters' souls, in an animated and extremely vivid way. Furthermore, very smartly, he attributes the moral aspects of the characters to their physical look. My complete review of this book can be found at [...]