'Dead Souls'

A clever novel by Nikolai Gogol, the Russian novelist, who set most of his stories post-Napoleon. This novel portrays a certain important stage in Russia's history -- an empire still stuck in serfdom.

This novel follows Chichikov, a middle-class shyster seeking to climb the ladder of land ownership. The only way he saw to acquire land was to roam the countryside buying up dead serfs, or dead souls.

The idea being is that the only way to acquire wealth -- or the facade of wealth -- is to collect serfs, dead or alive, which were essentially slaves, used by the landowners to farm their land.

The book is not so much about the actual deceased serfs but instead the grotesque land owners that Chichikov encounters in his voyage. The serfs are the lucky ones, they're not living monsters.

Chichikov winds up using the idea of owning all of these serfs as collateral to buying land. Dead serfs have the same value as live serfs, in mother Russia.