Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol · 1842
A swindler travels rural Russia buying "dead souls" (deceased serfs still listed in census rolls). Gogol's 1842 novel is simultaneously absurdist comedy and the darkest vision of Russian bureaucracy and provincial life. Nabokov called Gogol "the greatest prose magician of Russian literature."
The case against
Unfinished, and not gently: Gogol burned Part Two twice and the surviving fragments break off mid-sentence. Part One is one joke iterated, Chichikov visiting landowner after landowner, each grotesque a fresh variation on the same transaction. The lyrical troika digressions are glorious or insufferable depending on your patience for an author wandering off.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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