Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls" is produced here in a definitive translation by B.G. Guerney. In his introduction, Renè Wellek opines that "whoever comes to the reading of Gogol's 'Dead Souls' with preconceptions of the nature of the Russian novel based upon reading of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy will be surprised and delighted to discover something very different. Here is a comic epic, a gallery of portraits, a loosely assembled travel story with little psychology, no tragic conflict, no debates concerning God and immortality." Instead, Gogol paints a realistic panorama of Russia in the 1840s, complete with a vivid cast of boorish, fraudulent, and banal characters afflicting the culture of the day. Clearly a classic of Russian literature.