Dead Souls

The cut-off came at the perfect time. I was going towards 4.5 stars in the last 50 pages for a variety of reasons but if you really, and I mean REALLY, understood what Gogol was intending in this book, even if the cut-off was not intended, you would know why this is a perfect end.

I feel this is the end of an era. I absolutely left a part of my heart in this book.

(There is a re-imagined continuation with 60 pages written 5 years after Gogol's death in my copy. It is not available in other translations I have seen. I am not usually into these kind of things. I considered the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series to have ended with Douglas Adams life and I fear ruining the magic this book has on me right now by reading the continuation in someone else's pen, which I also feel would be irrelevant. I think it ended where it should have unless Gogol himself have imagined it differently. I might go back in a few years and read that final chapter. But for now, for me, Chichikov's story is satisfactory in how I understood the author to have intended the manuscript to come across).


This book has taken a duplex apartment in my head, rent free.