Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. A comic masterpiece from the great age of Russian literature, Dead Souls, published in 1842, tells the story of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a corrupt minor bureaucrat. Posing as a landowner, Chichikov attempts to buy up the identities of dead peasants in a scam designed to obtain free land from the government. His quest takes him across remote provinces and into the homes of ever more eccentric characters in a journey of self-revelation which Gogol uses to construct a fantastic satire of his time.