Dead Souls: The Adventures of Chichikov

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. A modest carriage rolls into the provincial Russian town of N—, carrying a gentleman of no particular distinction who nonetheless makes it his business, within days, to be liked by everyone who matters. Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov calls on officials, flatters wives, and above all courts the local landowners, each of whom he visits in turn with a proposal so strange that most of them can barely make sense of it: he wishes to buy their dead serfs. Not living laborers, but the ones who have died since the last census and remain, on paper, still taxable property, still legally his if he pays for them.

What Chichikov intends to do with these "dead souls" unfolds gradually as Gogol takes the reader from one landowner's estate to the next, each host a fresh specimen of provincial vice: the saccharine idler Manilov, the suspicious brute Sobakevich, the miser Plyushkin whose hoarding has reduced him to squalor amid his own wealth. As Chichikov's purchases mount, so does the town's curiosity, and Gogol lets rumor and gossip work on his hero with magnificent absurdity.

Gogol called Dead Souls a poem rather than a novel, envisioning it as the first part of a three-volume structure modeled loosely on Dante's Divine Comedy, though he completed only this first volume and burned most of a second shortly before his death in 1852. Published in 1842, it remains one of the foundational works of Russian prose, a satire of provincial greed and bureaucratic absurdity written with a comic exuberance that never fully conceals its author's despair over the country he loved. This new translation presents the complete novel, read in full.

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Lydbog: 3. oktober 2026