Product Description
Nikolai Gogol. Dead Souls. Moscow: Художественная литература, 1964. Blue cloth hardcover, 394 pages. Illustrations by A. Agin. Solidly bound copy with mild external wear, crisp pages and clean text.
Dead Souls (Мёртвые души) was first published in 1842. The novel is a classic and chronicles the adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters. The purpose of the novel was to demonstrate the flaws of the Russian character. Gogol portrayed those defects through Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov (Павел Иванович Чичиков) and the Russian middle-class people whom he encounters.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) was by nationality Ukrainian and spoke Russian and Ukrainian. Gogol is mentioned several times in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk and Crime and Punishment and Chekhov's The Seagull.
Illustrations by Alexander Alekseevich Agin (1817-1875), one of the founders of modern Russian illustration. He provided images for the works of Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Pushkin as well as others. He is best known for the 104 drawings he created for Dead Souls, which were turned into woodcuts by his collaborator, Evstafy Bernardsky.