Dead Souls, and the great Russian con

The premise is so strange it sounds invented twice: a man travels the Russian provinces purchasing the names of dead serfs — still taxable property until the next census — to mortgage for a fortune. It's a swindle, and it's also one of the funniest road trips in literature.

Gogol uses Chichikov's carriage as an excuse to visit a gallery of landowners, each more absurd than the last: the sentimental one, the miser, the bully, the man who is simply a hole in the air. Each visit is a perfect comic set piece.

And what Russian does not love fast driving?

He meant to write a Russian Divine Comedy and burned the second part in despair. What survives is the Inferno — buoyant, bizarre, and weirdly affectionate toward the country it skewers.

Read it for the famous troika passage at the end, where the satire suddenly lifts off the ground and becomes something like a hymn.