NIKOLAI VASILEVICH GOGOL was born at Sorotchinetz, in Little Russia, in March, 1809, the exact day being impossible to discover. The year in which he appeared on the planet proved to be the literary annus mirabilis of the century; for in this same twelvemonth were born Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, Abraham Lincoln, Poe, Gladstone, Holmes, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. His father was a literary amateur, who wrote dramatic pieces for his own amusement, and who spent his time on the old family estate, not in managing the farms, but in wandering about the gardens and beholding the fowls of the air. The boy inherited much from his father; but he had the best of all private tutors, a good mother, of whom his biographer says, Elle demeure toujours sa plus intime amie.

Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, a comic masterpiece about a mysterious con man and his grotesque victims, is one of the major works of Russian literature. It was translated into English in 1942 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; the translation was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "an extraordinarily fine piece of work" and is still considered the best translation of Dead Souls ever published. Long out of print, the Guerney translation of Dead Souls is now reissued. The text has been made more faithful to Gogol's original by removing passages that Guerney inserted from earlier drafts of Dead Souls. The text is accompanied by Susanne Fusso's introduction and by appendixes that present excerpts from Guerney's translations of other drafts of Gogol's work and letters Gogol wrote around the time of the writing and publication of Dead Souls.