Reading Groups

Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls with Mike Levine

Once a week Tuesdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT October 24 to November 14, 2023

The Center for Fiction

The ‘With Book’ option includes a copy of Dead Souls at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

What kind of novel is Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, published in 1842? Its hero (if that’s the word for him), Chichikov, concocts a scheme whereby he buys serfs who have died since the previous government census but are still considered taxable property – “dead souls” – and then sells as a means to becoming a landowner himself. Vissarion Belinsky and Vasily Rozanov, renowned Russian critics in their time, wrote (respectively) that there wasn’t a single funny word in the book and that it corrupted Russian readers. In our time, Mel Brooks routinely cites it as having changed his life. It was for him “a revelation…. hysterically funny and incredibly moving.” Like all masterpieces, Dead Souls tells us as much about ourselves as the world from which it emerged. It is both a savage portrait of the brutality of czarist Russia and a novel written in what Nabokov called “a life-generating syntax,” a demonstration of the power of language to create its own reality.

Meeting Details:
Tuesdays, 6–7:30pm ET
10/24, 10/31, 11/7, 11/14
In Person at The Center for Fiction

Before the first session, participants should have read chapters 1–3 (pp. 1–55).

Led By

Mike Levine

Mike Levine

Mike Levine is an independent editor. He was previously an acquisitions editor at Northwestern University Press. Among the authors he published were Jen Beagin (Whiting Award winner), A. E. Stallings (National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, finalist), and Stephen Karam (Pulitzer Prize in Drama, finalist). He has also been a senior editor at the Great Books Foundation. Since 2000, he has taught literature and film seminars in several continuing education programs. He has a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in English from Rice University.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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