Gogol diagnosed us perfectly. A copying clerk who lives and dies for an overcoat. A civil servant outranked by his own nose. Two friends who spend twelve years in court over a single word. Nobody has written the disease more precisely — and nobody has prescribed worse. Gogol looked for the cure in moral improvement, fed the second half of Dead Souls into the stove, and starved to death at forty-two.

This book follows twenty-four of his works to the bottom of the hole he dug, and then begins where he stopped.