Word: belokurov
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Gogol was one of those writers who take up their country's venality as their cross. The closest U.S. equivalent of Dead Souls is Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. Gogol's confidence man is Chichikov (Vladimir Belokurov), an on-the-make bureaucrat who haggles with miserly and drunken aristocrats for their dead serfs (listed on the government tax rolls as alive) so that he may pose as a propertied man, float a mortgage loan, and make a fashionable marriage. Just as murder is war in miniature, Gogol's Chichikov is a comic common cold symbolizing...
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