Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a biography of Nikolai Gogol that I'm about to receive in the mail, said of his fellow Russian: "Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange." That's the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition of Dead Souls, trans. by Robert A. Maguire. True to Nabokov's reckoning, Dead Souls is a very strange book. The plot is simple: "a gentleman of the middling sort"—"not good looking, but not uncomely in appearance either, not overly fat, nor overly thin"—arrives in a nameless provincial town with an unspoken purpose that gradually reveals itself: to buy the legal rights to the deceased serfs of neighboring landowners. The sleepy town is aroused by this visit from a stranger whom the gentry speculate to be a millionaire; the officials of the town fete and flatter him. Meanwhile Chichikov—that's the name of Gogol's "hero"—drives around in a britska, getting lost and waylaid, paying visits to the landowners and, without revealing why he wants to purchase the dead souls, tries to wheedle them into making a sale.

As one might expect from this description, Dead Souls is a funny book. Gogol's style is wonderfully discursive without coming unglued. He conjures up a world not only through Chichikov's various adventures, and the pen-portraits of the strange landowners he visits, but from wild similes that can end up being small stories of their own, dream-like images, or compose little moral sermons, even attacks on middle-brow taste. Here's an example taken from Chichikov's visit to the demented hermit Plyushkin:

"...suddenly across that wooden face glided a warm ray. It was not a feeling that had found expression, but some pale reflection of a feeling, a phenomenon like the unexpected appearance of a drowning man on the surface of the water, which evokes a joyful shout from the crowd gathered on the bank. But in vain do the rejoicing brothers and sisters throw a rope from the bank and wait for another glimpse of the back or the arms exhausted from struggling—his one appearance was the final one. Everything is quite dead, and thereafter the becalmed surface of the unresponsive element becomes even more dreadful and desolate. So too the face of Plyushkin, in the wake of the feeling that had glided across it for just and instant, became even more unfeeling and more ordinary."