Read-along

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol, 1842. Sixteen chapters, each with a summary and a short analysis — illustrated three times over, as lithographic caricature, as Russian mood landscape, and as popular woodcut broadside.

16 chapters · 160 plates per style · three styles

Illustration style

Part One

Chapter 1 10 plates

A gentleman arrives at N.

A britska rolls through the gate of a hostelry in an unnamed provincial capital, carrying a gentleman "not good looking, but not uncomely", neither fat nor thin, neither old nor young. Two…
Chapter 2 10 plates

Manilov gives them away free

After a week of dinners, Chichikov sets out for Manilov's. The narrator pauses over his two serfs: Petrushka, who sleeps in his master's cast-off frock-coat and reads anything for the pleas…
Chapter 3 10 plates

Korobochka fears selling too cheap

Selifan lectures the crafty dappled trace-horse on righteous living while a thunderstorm breaks, the road turns to mud, and he misses every turning. Drunk and cheerfully unrepentant — "you…
Chapter 4 10 plates

Nozdryov cheats at everything

Stopping at a roadside inn for suckling pig with horseradish and sour cream, Chichikov runs into Nozdryov, fresh from the fair where he has lost everything including his watch and one side-…
Chapter 5 10 plates

Sobakevich prices the dead high

Fleeing Nozdryov, Chichikov's britska collides with a carriage carrying a golden-haired girl of sixteen whose face has "the roundness of a delicate fresh egg". Uncle Mityay and Uncle Minyay…
Chapter 6 10 plates

Plyushkin and his great heap

The narrator opens by mourning the lost curiosity of his youth — "Oh, my youth! Oh, my freshness!" — then delivers Chichikov to Plyushkin's village: corduroy paving, roofs like sieves, grai…
Chapter 7 10 plates

The deeds signed, the dead named

The narrator contrasts the writer who shows humanity in splendour with the one who sets forth "the dreadful, appalling morass of trifles that mires our lives", and claims the second, harder…
Chapter 8 10 plates

The ball, and one fatal snub

The town debates whether Chichikov's peasants will survive resettlement in Kherson and concludes he is a millionaire. The ladies of the town that will remain nameless — strict in morals, Fr…
Chapter 9 10 plates

Two ladies invent an elopement

Two ladies — the Lady Pleasant in All Respects and the Merely Pleasant Lady — meet over scallops and a dress pattern, then get to the news. Korobochka has been to the Arch-priest's wife wit…
Chapter 10 10 plates

Captain Kopeikin and Napoleon

The officials, all visibly thinner from worry, gather at the Chief of Police's and settle on nothing. The Postmaster produces the Tale of Captain Kopeikin: a veteran of 1812 who loses an ar…
Chapter 11 10 plates

Where the whole scheme came from

The departure is delayed: horses to shoe, a wheel to re-rim, blacksmiths charging six times the price. On the way out the britska is halted by the Public Prosecutor's funeral, which Chichik…

Dead Souls

Part One

A gentleman arrives at N.

Manilov gives them away free

Korobochka fears selling too cheap

Nozdryov cheats at everything

Sobakevich prices the dead high

Plyushkin and his great heap

The deeds signed, the dead named

The ball, and one fatal snub

Two ladies invent an elopement

Captain Kopeikin and Napoleon

Where the whole scheme came from

Part Two Gogol burned most of the continuation; what follows is the surviving fragment.

Tentetnikov wakes very slowly

The General laughs and consents

Three landowners, three ruinations

Chichikov buys a real estate

Arrest, mercy, and a broken page