Dead Souls. Gogol N.V.

The history of the development of literature is a much more extensive concept than we can assume, and much more complicated than the first-year student of the Faculty of Philology can imagine. Continuously, any choice of “best books” and “mandatory readers” of writers is accompanied by a merciless cut of the pearls from the approved norm and the “golden standard”. There are many geniuses, recognized and unrecognized, and masterpieces of world literature. Books of the World Classics Books series - an attempt to expand the concept of classical books and obligatory authors that has established in the minds, offering the reader a work that he either did not hear at all, or is very much from afar.

However, the works presented in the series are some kind of milestone stages on the complex path of development of world literature, without which it is difficult to make ideas about various genres, literary schools and entire eras of the development of world culture. The cover presents a reproduction of the picture of Isaac Ilyich Levitan “Forest. Sunny day ”, 1884, private collection.