![]() ![]() I had already experienced a year of obsessive relationship analysis ( Anna Karenina), six months beneath the thumb of a powerful boss whose political maneuvers were far reaching and whose requests quickly spiraled into the hellish and fantastic ( The Master and Margarita), a week on the run with a depressive whose obsessive psychosis ended in a prison sentence ( Crime and Punishment), a much-too-long friendship with a man whose preoccupations with his father were borderline incestuous ( Fathers and Sons), and, after I finished War and Peace, years stuck in sprawling disillusionment that, unlike many characters in the novel, I have yet to overcome. Every time I read one of the Russian greats my life transforms into an eerie mirror of the work. I wish I would have been more cautious in picking a book. I wanted some other grand, sweeping Russian epic to fill my time. I wasn’t keen to have my life ruined again. I chose to read this novel at the start of quarantine, when everyone else was reading War and Peace. Nikolai Gogol knew this when he wrote his masterpiece, Dead Souls, the story of a middle-aged man named Chichikov who buys dead serfs with the intention of mortgaging their souls for a profit. Scanned, postprocessed, and uploaded by Karl Hahn. ![]() Engraving from Gustave Doré’s 1861 illustration of Dante’s Inferno. ![]()
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