Dead Souls - Gogol, Nikolai

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Résumé :
Dead Souls (Russian: ??????? ????, Mj?rtvyje d?shi) is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov (Russian: ????? ???????? ???????) and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle-class of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an epic poem in prose, and within the book characterised it as a novel in verse. Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol destroyed it shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne's Sentimental Journey), it is regarded by some as complete in the extant form.

Biographie:
Nikolai Gogol (March 19, 1809 - March 4,1852) was born in the Ukrainian Cossack town of Sorochyntsi, in the Russian Empire. He began writing early and after he left school in 1828, he went to St. Petersburg to pursue a career as a writer. He found success with his first volume of short stories and developed a passion for Ukrainian Cossack history. His novel, Taras Bulba, was the result of this phase in his interests.In 1834, Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, a job for which he had no qualifications. The academic venture proved a disaster, and he resigned in 1835. From 1836 to 1848, Gogol lived abroad, travelling through Germany and Switzerland. Gogol spent the winter of 1836-37 in Paris, among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles. In 1842, the first part of Dead Souls was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842, under a new title imposed by the censorship, The Adventures of Chichikov. The book established his reputation as one of the greatest prose writers in the language. After the triumph of Dead Souls, Gogol's contemporaries came to regard him as a great satirist who lampooned the unseemly sides of Imperial Russia. In April 1848, Gogol returned to Russia from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and spent his last years in restless movement throughout the country. On the night of 24 February 1852 he burned some of his manuscripts, which contained most of the second part of Dead Souls. Soon thereafter, he took to bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later.