Book Description 　　Few literary works have been so variously interpreted as Nikolai Gogol's enduring comic masterpiece, Dead Souls . The text of the work is the acclaimed George Reavey translation, which has been fully annotated. 　　 　　"Backgrounds and Sources" contains not only Gogol's correspondence relevant to the novel, but also the four formal "Letters" that set forth his views on the work. The editor has also included a useful chronology of Gogol's life and an invaluable table of ranks in czarist Russia. 　　 　　"Essays in Criticism" reprints fourteen essays, including Robert Maguire's general overview of Gogol criticism; two nineteenth-century Russian appraisals; Donald Fanger's essay and a broad spectrum of twentieth-century Russian critical opinion; and essays by Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, among others. The Russian essays have been translated for this Nortan Critical Edition. 　　 　　A Selected Bibliography is also included. 　　 　　About the Series: Each Norton Critical Edition includes an authoritative text, contextual and source materials, and a wide range of interpretations - from contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory - as well as a bibliography and, in many cases, a chronology of the author's life and work. 　　 　　The Editor: Geoge Gibian was Goldwin Smith Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He recived his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught at Smith College, Amherst, and Berkeley. He traveled and studied in the Soviet Union and received a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1985 he was Rockefeller Foundation Scholar. Among his publications are Tolstoy and Shakespeare; The Interval of Freedom; Soviet Russian Literature During the Thaw; The Man in the Black Coat; Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd; The Poems of Jaroslav Seifert; and Norton Critical Editions of Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Crime and Punishment . 　　 　　 Book Dimension 　　length: (cm)21.1 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.8