Dead Souls: The Adventures of Chichikov
Nikolai Gogol
Oct 2026 · Sonictale Studios · Narrated by AI Voice F. Hearts
headphones
Audiobook
11 hr 35 min
Unabridged
family_home
Eligible
info
Want a free 9 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline.
Add
About this audiobook
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.
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.
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, flatt...
Discover more
Rate this audiobook
Tell us what you think.
Listening information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
