A mild-mannered gentleman arrives in a provincial Russian town and begins purchasing deceased serfs who still appear on the census rolls, a scheme so peculiar that no one can quite believe it and everyone is happy to profit from it. Gogol sends his hero Chichikov rattling across the countryside in a troika, visiting landowners who are each a masterpiece of comic grotesquerie: the sentimental hoarder, the blustering liar, the miser who lives on crumbs. Published in 1842, the novel was intended as the first part of a Russian Divine Comedy, but Gogol burned the sequel in a fit of religious despair. What survives is the Inferno alone, and it is magnificent: a portrait of a nation whose soul is as dead as the serfs on Chichikov's lists.