With an Introduction by Anthony Briggs. Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood.Russia in the 1840s. There is a stranger in town, and he is behaving oddly. The unctuous Pavel Chichikov goes around the local e
'Hey, you with the beard!' A coiffured con man travels across Russia's rural backwaters, buying the souls of dead serfs from their owners to make his fortune, in Gogol's exuberant, bravura masterwork: