Chichikov travels through the Russian provinces buying dead serfs: peasants who have died since the last census but remain on the rolls, useful for fraudulent collateral. Gogol's 1842 novel is the Russian Divine Comedy, with this first volume representing the Inferno. He burned the second volume; the third was never written. What remains is a gallery of grotesque landowners, a meditation on the Russian soul, and some of the most brilliant prose in the language. Nabokov considered it the greatest novel in Russian. Many Russians agree.