We’re doing another mini-series! This time, on Russian novelists! As we should, we start at the beginning with the author of the first Russian Novel, Nikolai Gogol and his book Dead Souls.
Show Notes
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Here are the links relating to the episode:
7 Writers Who Were Inspired by Russian Literature
This is a wonderful write up of Gogol. It’s almost like Time Magazine did a piece on him!
Here’s a link to the Penguin Classics version of Dead Souls.
Here are two examples of modern Defamiliarization:
I love Dead Souls! As you point out, it’s such a wonderfully funny and clever work with such an interesting history. Your clarification that he is buying paperwork, not corpses, is an important one, but how very funny to think of an interpretation in which this could be considered one of the first literary works about zombies! In a way, abstractly, perhaps someone might be able to claim that. Thanks for this episode!
I hate to admit how long I read it, hoping we would come upon a big cart of dead bodies, all appropriately labelled!
Haha! Yes! That would have made it even better!