Dead Souls

Paperback, 432 pages Published 1842 Barnes & Noble Classics Series (2005) Introduction by: Jeffrey Meyers Russia’s first major novel, and perhaps still its most popular, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is a comic epic of greed and gluttony that is admired not only for its colorful cast of characters and devastating satire, but also for its sense of moral fervor. The anti-hero of the novel is a man named Chichikov, who hatches a brilliant plan to get rich quick. He will journey through Russia and buy up, at reduced rates, the recently deceased serfs of landowners, who now won’t have to pay government taxes on the ‘dead souls.’ With this list of fictitious serfs as collateral, Chichikov can buy an estate and begin amassing his fortune. What follows is a series of grotesquely humorous transactions with Russian landowners, each more queer and repellant than the last. Although Gogol spends much of the novel exposing the evils of the Russian gentry through absurd and hilarious satire, he also expresses a passionate love for his country that resonates with readers even today. A stylistic tour de force, encompassing an astonishing range of voices from delicate, intimate lyricism to robust, bawdy ribaldry, Dead Souls is an intensely felt anatomy of the human condition.

In this rich compilation, Emeka Nwosu takes the reader to a journey of the issues that have helped to shape discourses on various aspects of the Nigerian state and society. The articles, originally published in his weekly column in the premier Nigerian daily newspaper, ThisDay, not only show his perspectives on these issues when they were written but also reveal how discussions on some of those issues have evolved over time and how they have mutated today.

Journalists, especially those who maintain regular columns, are often said to write 'history in a hurry'. For experienced writers like the author whose writings are research-based, it does not mean that what they write about is factually wrong but simply that their writings are infused with the passions and emotions that attended those issues as they unfolded.

This collection is therefore not only informed commentaries on some of the issues that have shaped the contour of the Nigerian state and society over the years but a good trip on the passions and emotions that attended those discourses. The articles, 66 of them, are written with remarkable candour and gusto and therefore a delight to read. They form a very important contribution to the corpus of works on Nigerian politics and society.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol was first published in 1842, and is one of the most prominent works of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book as a "novel in verse". Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol destroyed it shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne's Sentimental Journey), it is usually regarded as complete in the extant form. In Russia before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, landowners were entitled to own serfs to farm their land .. Dead Souls is a socially critical black comedy. Set in Russia before the emancipation of serfs in 1861, the "dead souls" are dead serfs still being counted by landowners as property, as well as referring to the landowners' morality. Through surreal and often dark comedy, Gogol criticizes Russian society after the Napoleonic Wars. He intended to also offer solutions to the problems he satirized, but died before he ever completed the second part of what was intended to be a trilogy. The work famously ends mid-sentence. Chichikov, an amusing and often confused schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from landholders' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit