Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls Annotated and Illustrated Edition by Nikolai Gogol

In Gogol's time, a Russian landowner could buy and sell serfs, or "souls," like any other property. The serfs were counted, for the purpose of tax assessment, every ten years. Thus, a landowner still had to pay taxes on the value of serfs who had died, until the next ten-year census could legally record the deaths. In Dead Souls, a prose novel subtitled A Poem, Gogol's hero, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, plans to buy the titles to these "dead souls" and use them as collateral to obtain a large loan. He comes to a small provincial town and begins to proposition the local landowners: the slothful Manilovs (the "kind-manners"), the slovenly Plewshkin ("Mr. Spitoon"), the coarse Sobakievich ("Mr. Dog"), the cautious Madame Korobachka ("Mrs. Box"), and the bully and cheat Nozdryov ("Mr. Nostrils").