Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
The scam runs on dead serfs.
For you if
you've watched the paperwork matter more than the person it describes.
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Chichikov travels the Russian provinces buying up the names of serfs who have died but are still on the tax rolls, because the empire taxes the dead as if they were alive and a living-looking estate gets you a loan. Every landowner he meets is a different shade of greedy, lazy, paranoid or sentimental, and he keeps getting what he wants. It is the funniest book you will read about bureaucracy, property and the people who treat other human beings as line items.
Where This Book Lives
- Themes
- class and social conventiongreed and consumptionpolitical corruptionsatiresatire of bureaucracysocial hypocrisy
- Topics
- tsarist russia
Pass with note: Gogol turned reactionary late in life (Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends), and the antisemitic portrayals in Taras Bulba are part of the record. Dead Souls itself is a satire of serfdom and graft. Pick a recent translation. Companion to The Nose and Other Stories.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
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Impotent in more ways than one.
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Why it’s here: Punk in turning literal impotence into political indictment — the new Senegalese elite performing revolution while quietly keeping their old French patrons' interests intact. Pedagogical in showing how independence can be captured by the same corruption wearing new clothes.
Where to watch: Streaming on Criterion ChannelLetterboxd ↗
Bacurau(2019)
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Same theme: Political Corruption
A town disappears from the map. Then the hunt begins.
Days after burying its matriarch, a small town in Brazil's rural sertão vanishes from every map, its water supply is cut, and a group of wealthy foreign mercenaries arrives to hunt its residents for sport — only to discover Bacurau has no intention of dying quietly.
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Where to watch: Rent/buy: Apple TV, Amazon, Fandango at HomeLetterboxd ↗
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
