FIRST AMERICAN EDITION OF CONSTANCE GARNETT'S TRANSLATION OF GOGOL’S DEAD SOULS

GOGOL, Nikolai V. Dead Souls. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. Two volumes. Octavo, original blue cloth, original dust jackets. $4500.

First U.S. edition of a highly regarded translation of the Russian novelist’s unfinished masterwork, scarce in original dust jackets.

First published in 1842 in Russian, Gogol's Dead Souls is now widely regarded as the foundation of the Realist movement in Russia, and "the first novel from which the world began to form its ideas of 19th-century Russia" (Hornstein, 139). A satirical story of bureaucracy and serfdom, the novel was extremely popular, as it was interpreted as an obvious condemnation of feudalism. In response to the success of Dead Souls, Gogol began work on a second volume, and "while working on this continuation he began to show signs of religious obsession. In 1848, after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he felt confirmed in his belief that he was eternally damned. Convinced of the sinfulness of his creative work, he destroyed the manuscripts of the second part of Dead Souls. What remains is only a disjointed fragment" (Hornstein, 221). Tragically, Gogol burned the draft of the second volume only ten days before his death in 1852. The first complete English translation (with the second volume reconstructed from the author's surviving notebooks) was published in 1886; when Garnett's version appeared in 1922, it quickly became the standard for English-speaking readers. Published in the U.K. in the preceding year by Chatto & Windus. This first U.S. edition was part of the Knopf series of Gogol's works in translations by Garnett. Line, 48.

Books in fine condition; in near-fine, price-clipped dust jackets with only minor edge-wear and slight spine toning, one short closed edge tear to back panel of volume I.