The dead souls

Author's name: Nikolai Gogol Publisher: Al-Mada Publishing and Distribution Year of publication: 2014 Literary classification: Novel Brief about the book: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol... The author embodies Russian society, especially the landowning nobles in the nineteenth century during a period of Tsarist Russia's history when the prevailing system of labor on agricultural land was serfdom, which is one of the modified slave systems derived from slavery, where the serf is not owned directly by the landowner but his work is owned by the owner with a symbolic wage in addition to his food and drink. Large agricultural lands and farms were measured by the number of serfs (souls) needed to serve these farms. It is said that the owner owns a thousand (serfs) or ten thousand (serfs), understanding from that the extent of the agricultural area he has, considering that one hectare requires a certain number of souls. And the diabolical idea that haunted Chichikov's (the protagonist's) mind, a simple employee, was that the number of owned souls by people is only known precisely during the census year, which occurs every ten years. Therefore, if souls die during this period, they remain only on paper without actual existence. Consequently, he sought to make his famous tour to buy dead souls from the original owners at a cheap price, so that it could be said that he owns a large number of souls, and thus he would be considered among the noble landowners.