Dead Souls

I have wanted to read Nikolai Gogol's only (unfinished) novel, Dead Souls (1842) since reading his amazing short stories (I think "The Overcoat" is one of the greatest short stories ever written). The novel doesn't disappoint, it is the story of a middle-class Russian, Chichikov, who attempts to bolster his own image by buying dead or missing titles of serfs from landowners that he comes across in his journey (and taking on the tax responsibility of those souls) in order to increase his own image as landowner with a great number serfs in his charge (at least on paper). Through this plot Gogol can satirize many classes and types of Russian society and traditions. The fact that it was unfinished does little to diminish the enjoyment of the novel at large, but does have the story awkwardly end.