Complete and unabridged, with 100 full-page plates by Vladimir Makovsky, Vassily Maximov and Vasily Vereshchagin. Gogol's Dead Souls in its first English dress, published in 1854 as a picture of Russian country life for readers who had never seen one. Chichikov buys the names of serfs who have died since the last census, and each landowner he visits is a portrait of a way of being ruined. The translator's title suits the disguise: this was sold to England as travel and is one of the great comic novels. A hundred plates of Russian painting, from Vishnyakov to Vereshchagin, mirror the novel's own gallery of landowners and officials.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a Russian writer born in what is now Ukraine, whose comic grotesques hide a bleak view of the world. The Government Inspector scandalised officialdom, and Dead Souls was hailed as a national epic. Convinced by a fanatical priest that his art was sinful, he burned the sequel days before his death, then refused food and died at forty-two.