How long does it take to read Dead Souls?
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol takes about 5 hours 49 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 49 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1942. 317 pages, about 87,175 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 41 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 49 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 38 minutes |
The page count is the median across 335 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Dead Souls is a satirical Russian novel that follows Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a middle-aged gentleman of modest rank and means. He arrives in a provincial town and wins over its officials and landowners with his charm. He keeps his past and his aims to himself while pursuing an odd scheme: buying dead souls, meaning serfs who have died but still count for taxes because censuses are rare. Travelling from estate to estate, he meets a gallery of greedy, suspicious, eccentric squires who typify the middle aristocracy and the bureaucracy Gogol mocks.
This summary was written by AI and checked by a second AI model. How these are chosen.
Subjects: Fiction, historical, general, Russia (federation), fiction, Slavic philology
