Author: Nikolai Gogol File Type: epub Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, is part of the _Barnes & Noble Classics_series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics ull All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works. lulRussias first major novel, and perhaps still its most popular, Nikolai Gogols Dead Souls is a comic epic of greed and gluttony that is admired not only for its colorful cast of characters and devastating satire, but also for its sense of moral fervor. The anti-hero of the novel is a man named Chichikov, who hatches a brilliant plan to get rich quick. He will journey through Russia and buy up, at reduced rates, the recently deceased serfs of landowners, who now wont have to pay government taxes on the dead souls. With this list of fictitious serfs as collateral, Chichikov can buy an estate and begin amassing his fortune. What follows is a series of grotesquely humorous transactions with Russian landowners, each more queer and repellant than the last. Although Gogol spends much of the novel exposing the evils of the Russian gentry through absurd and hilarious satire, he also expresses a passionate love for his country that resonates with readers even today. A stylistic tour de force, encompassing an astonishing range of voices from delicate, intimate lyricism to robust, bawdy ribaldry, Dead Souls is an intensely felt anatomy of the human condition. Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published forty-three books, including biographies of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and George Orwell. He also wrote the Introductions and Notes to the Barnes & Noble Classics editions of Edith Whartons The House of Mirth and Rudyard Kiplings Kim.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. From Jeffrey Meyerss Introduction to _Dead Souls_Like Edgar Allan Poe, born the same year, Gogol suffered from poverty and had grandiose literary ambitions. They came from different countries, had different languages and cultures, and probably never heard of each other, but they were surprisingly similar. Like Poe, Gogol moved restlessly from place to place, shamelessly sponged off family and friends, read his works aloud with dramatic effect, used several pseudonyms (including the cryptic 0000), was interested in fashionable clothing and interior decor, allowed cats to play intriguing parts in his tales, failed to finish major projects, poached from obscure sources, claimed knowledge he didnt have, suffered delusions of grandeur, and was driven by suicidal impulses. Poe drank himself to death Gogol starved himself to death. Like Poe, Gogol was strongly influenced by the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who depicted pathological states and criminal impulses, and created a disturbing atmosphere by combining factual reality with grotesque fantasies. Both Poe and Gogol had a strong element of sadomasochism in their lives and their imaginations, and wrote tortuous and often outrageous books with Arabesque in the titles. They had a haunted, hallucinatory vision, with idealized dead women rising from the grave to harm the living and the Devil himself making a menacing appearance. Both used caricature and melodrama, emphasized the eccentric and bizarre aspects of human experience, and portrayed the lower depths of society. Both described incest and violent retribution, the nightmare of urban isolation, the power of the supernatural, and the horrific as well as the precarious instability, psychological disintegration, and mental collapse of their self-destructive heroes. Gogols tale The Diary of a Madman describes the sort of unbalanced first-person narrator who appears in many of Poes stories. Gogols appearance and character matched his weird behavior. An actor portrayed him as both foppish and slovenly Of medium height, blond, with a huge wig, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles on his long, birdlike nose, with squinting little eyes, and firmly compressed, as if bit-together, lips. Turgenev, who hadnt seen Gogol for fifteen years, met him in Moscow in 1851 and, with a novelists eye, deduced his character from his unattractive, vulpine (rather than birdlike) appearance His fair hair, which fell straight from the temples, as is usual with Cossacks, still preserved its youthful tint, but had thinned noticeably his smooth, retreating white forehead conveyed, as before, the impression of great intelligence. His small brown eyes sparkled with gaiety at timesyes, gaiety and not sarcasm but mostly they looked tired. Gogols long, pointed nose gave his face a sort of cunning, fox-like expression his puffy, soft lips under the clipped moustache also produced an unfavourable impression in their indefinite contoursso at least it seemed to methe dark sides of his character found expression. When he spoke, they opened unpleasantly, showing a row of bad teeth. His small chin disappeared into his wide, black velvet cravat. Another friend, who unexpectedly called on Gogol when he was writing, was astonished by his exotic, theatrical dress Before me stood Gogol in the following fantastic get-up in place of bootslong Russian woolen stockings, which reached above the knee instead of a jacketa velvet spencer [short, double-breasted overcoat] over a flannel camisole, with a large, bright-colored scarf wrapped around his neck and a raspberry-colored, velvet kokoshnik, embroidered in gold, on his head, quite similar to the headdress of Finnish tribeswomen.

Author: Jon E. Lewis File Type: pdf The Assassination of JFK, 911, the Da Vinci Code, The Death of Diana, Men in Black, Pearl Harbor, The Illuminati, Protocols of Zion,Hess, The Bilderberg Group, New World Order, ElvisFluoridization, Martin Luther King s murder, Opus Dei, The Gemstone Files, John Paul I, Dead Sea Scrolls, Lockerbie bombing, Black helicopters In other words everything they never wanted you to know and were afraid you might ask! Jon E. Lewis explores the 100 most terrifying cover-ups of all time, from the invention of Jesus divinity (pace the Da Vinci Code) to Bushs and Blairs real agenda in invading Iraq. Entertainingly written and closely documented, the book provides each cover-up with a plausibility rating. Uncover why the Titanic sank, ponder the sinister VaticanMafia network that plotted the assassination of liberal John Paul, find out why NASA lost its files on Mars, read why no-one enters Area 51, and consider why medical supplies were already on site at Edgware Road before the 77 bombs detonated. Just because you are paranoid, it doesnt mean that they aren t out to conspire against you.