Dead Souls

Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature. It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as an extraordinarily fine piece of work and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol’s original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier drafts of Dead Souls. The text is accompanied by Susanne Fusso’s introduction and by appendixes that present excerpts from Guerney’s translations of other drafts of Gogol’s work and letters Gogol wrote around the time of the writing and publication of Dead Souls.