Gogol’s Crime and Punishment: An essay in the interpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History)

This monograph is nothing less than a bold attempt at solving the riddle of Gogol's novel Dead Souls that even inspired a staging of Dead Souls at Schauspiel Stuttgart. Heftrich gives a comprehensive, coherent answer to the question of the novel's meaning by meticulously laying bare its structure. The first part of the monograph is dedicated to one section of Gogol's novel that has been neglected by virtually all critics--a clue that leads to a strictly ethical reading of Gogol's epic. Gogol, as it emerges, constructed Dead Souls strictly according to a moral pattern. It is amazing to discover how flawlessly Dead Souls is built in this regard. The novel thus proves to be a true descendant of medieval romance with its inseparable interrelation between ethics and epics.

Urs Heftrich holds the Chair of Slavic Literatures at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of four monographs. As an editor and prize-winning translator of Czech and Russian poetry, he has been mediating Slavic Literatures in Germany since 1989.