Donald Rayfield is emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London.
Books
Dead Souls
This tale of an affably cunning con who establishes a thriving trade in “dead souls”—serfs who though no longer alive can still, he finds, be profitably bought and sold—is also a brilliant spoof of a corrupt society, full of the living dead. This new translation captures Gogol’s linguistic invention and the anarchic fun of his writing.