Mapped
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol
The smooth swindler Chichikov travels the Russian provinces buying up 'dead souls', serfs who have died but still count on the tax rolls, in a scheme to mortgage them for a fortune, and in doing so exposes a whole gallery of grotesque landowners. Gogol maps a satirical but recognisable Russia: the provincial town where Chichikov charms the officials, the estates of the misers and dreamers he visits, and the endless road along which his carriage rolls.
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Taras Bulba
Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's fierce romance of the Zaporozhian Cossacks follows the old warrior Taras Bulba and his sons Ostap and Andriy from their studies in Kyiv out onto the steppe, to the Cossack stronghold of the Sich on the Dnipro, and into a savage war against the Poles. The geography is the wide Ukrainian steppe: the academy at Kyiv, the island fastness of the Sich near present Zaporizhzhia, the besieged Polish town of Dubno, and the Dniester cliffs where Taras meets his end.
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