The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. James Woodward’s inquiry addresses itself to many fundamental questions: How is the theme developed? What characterizes the writer’s creative method? Does the structure of the novel reveal an inner logic? How can the digressive narrative style be reconciled with generally accepted standards of artistic unity and coherence? Background explanation: In feudal Russia, major landowners had to pay a tax according to the number of serfs (measured as 'souls') they owned. It tells the story of the ambitious guy Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, who had an idea for a great scam. Alone of the great Russian novels of the nineteenth-century, Dead Souls has remained almost as profound a mystery to critics as it was when it first. His close reading of the text offers a new interpretation by tracing the essential features of Gogol’s creative method.Īlthough Dead Souls is a subject of lively debate in almost every respect, no Western scholar has ever before made it the subject of book-length analysis. Dead Souls is the most famous novel by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. James Woodward disputes the traditional view of Gogol’s work, contending that it is not a sprawling mass of loosely connected episodes, details, and digressions. In Dead Souls, the author took such a great step that everything he had written until now seems weak and pale in comparison with them - this is how. Alone of the great Russian novels of the nineteenth-century, Dead Souls has remained almost as profound a mystery to critics as it was when it first appeared.

Dead souls russian novel