In the Russian Empire, the word "soul" referred to male serfs. It was the number of souls that determined the value of a property and the land tax owed by the owner. As censuses were only taken every five years, dead serfs sometimes "lived" for years in the state registers; and owners paid a tax on these dead souls. This absurdity of the system gave crooks, including the book's hero Chichikov, the idea of a land credit scam. In this great novel, Gogol presents us with a magnificent gallery of portraits. A comic, picaresque, virulent and often irresistible epic, Dead Souls is also a meditation on Russia, Mankind and Death.
