Gogol’s Crime and Punishment

This monograph is nothing less than a bold attempt at solving the riddle of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls  that even inspired a staging of Dead Souls  at Schauspiel Stuttgart. Heftrich gives a comprehensive, coherent answer to the question of the novel’s meaning by meticulously laying bare its structure. The first part of the monograph is dedicated to one section of Gogol’s novel that has been neglected by virtually all critics - a clue that leads to a strictly ethical reading of Gogol’s ep