Does this book deserve being regarded as a classic in your opinion?

Yes, it's is hilarious. Gogol set the stage for all future Russian authors (haven't heard of one that didn't like him and was not influenced by him).

>>8361216
It's a poser book, nobody that isn't slav can understand it, but they like the image so they will convince themselves they did

good literature, but don't see what's supposed to be SO great about it

it's like the dark souls of literature

I need to reread it. I wasn't really able to get into it the first time around, but after going through a lot of Gogol's short stories, I think I can tackle it again.

>>8361216
Collected tales is better imo.

>>8362002
>tfw just got a copy as a gift
P excited, been wanting it for a while

>>8361958
How so? Sounds like you only say so because similar names

>>8361487
Why can't non-slavs understand it? Is it full of puns or something?

>>8362002
His Petersburg tales are among the best short stories ever written.

>>8363647
Mysterious Slavic Soul(tm)

In fact, he just describes, if very beautifully, how slavs are. Which doesn't hold much interest for anyone but slavs. They aren't as different from western europeans as, say, japs (which is why japanese books are so amusing: it's completely different perspective on many things)

>>8364212
1/4 pole here, will i get gogol?

>>8364239
If you haven't lived east of Poland, then probably no.

>>8364212
Would you say that his description of the slavic soul still holds true post-communism? Or is this mystical consept a relic of the past?

I am slav (balt actually) and i could affirm your beliefs - we are all aggressive, drunk, awfully convenient liars thiefs what is with such a great clarity and clarity portrayed in this books

>>8364325
Still holds. I actually find it uncanny how resembling Gogol's or Chekhov's descriptions are for today's Russia.

>>8364328
self-hating cuck

>>8364338
No, he's a butthurt latvian (or litovian). They don't actually perceive themselves as slavs.

Even in translation, the poetic prose style shines through with an abundance of beautiful metaphors and rhetorical language. Nabokov highly praised Gogol's prose in the original Russian, and Nab. had pretty high standards for prose. It's a fucking hilarious book, too, which Dostoyevsky thought was a masterpiece, and he thought Gogol to have been a genius in general, and he patterned his own Brothers Karamazov over the projected plan for Dead Souls (itself based on Dante's Inferno, and also the Odyssey in other parts, thus prefiguring what everyone thinks of as Joyce's very clever and original plan for Ulysses). The title itself is a pun about Chichikov's buying, on paper, dead "souls" (or serfs) and trying to sell them for money, and, at the same time, the dead souls of the people he meets, who personify various sins, and his own dying soul, too, which was supposed to be redeemed according to Gogol's scheme of the story before he went temporarily mad, burned a great deal of the second part that he already had, blamed it on the Devil, and then died in pain and misery. (Ironically, Dostoyevsky couldn't finish his own Brothers K. either according to the plan; what we have is the first third; the rest was supposed to complete the Hell-Purgatory-Heaven scheme and make Alyosha more worldly but even more of a complete human being for it).

Nabokov devoted a whole fucking book to Gogol, a discussion of his life and work. The same Nabokov whose standards were so high that Dostoyevsky and Faulkner didn't meet them.

It's universally printed by a lot of corny but popular and universally accepted "classics" editions of books (Everyman's Library in OP, Modern Library, Penguin Classics).

There are tons of people reading it almost 200 years later who were moved by it, who thought it funny, who sympathized with the characters, who enjoyed the poetic prose style. There's still literary criticism being written on it. All of which confirms that it's standing the test of time

I don't know, OP, does it deserve to be regarded as a classic? You tell me.

>>8364325
the slav soul lives on

>>8366838
Unfortunately. Nothing screams psued than an admiration for slavic "literature" and "culture." I'm looking at you Vollmann.