PREPARER'S NOTE

The book this was typed from contains a complete Part I, and a
partial Part II, as it seems only part of Part II survived the
adventures described in the introduction. Where the text notes
that pages are missing from the "original", this refers to the
Russian original, not the translation.

All the foreign words were italicised in the original, a style
not preserved here. Accents and diphthongs have also been left
out.



INTRODUCTION

Dead Souls, first published in 1842, is the great prose classic of
Russia. That amazing institution, "the Russian novel," not only began
its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil'evich
Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come
since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree.
Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier
work by the same author, a short story entitled The Cloak; this idea
has been wittily expressed by another compatriot, who says: "We have
all issued out of Gogol's Cloak."

Dead Souls, which bears the word "Poem" upon the title page of the
original, has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the