Taras Bulba is a romanticized historical short story by Nikolai Gogol. It tells the story of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap. Taras' sons studied at the Kiev Academy and return home. The three men set out on a journey to Zaporizhian Sich located in Southern Ukraine, where they join other Cossacks and go to war against Poland. The work is non-fictional in nature, in that the main character is based on several historical personalities, and other characters are not as exaggerated or grotesque as was common in Gogol's later fiction. This story can be...

"However stupid a fools words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man."
--- Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The purpose of the novel was to demonstrate the flaws and faults of the Russian mentality and character. Gogol masterfully portrayed those defects through Paul Ivanovitch Chichikov (the main character) and the people whom he encounters in his endeavours. These people are typical of the Russian middle-class of the time. Gogol...

The exploits of Chichikov, a middle-aged gentleman of middling social class and means. Chichikov arrives in a small town and turns on the charm to woo key local officials and landowners. He reveals little about his past, or his purpose, as he sets about carrying out his bizarre and mysterious plan to acquire "dead souls." The government would tax the landowners based on how many serfs (or "souls") the landowner owned, determined by the census. Censuses in this period were infrequent, so landowners would often be paying taxes on serfs that were no longer living, thus the "dead souls." It is...