Dead Souls is an incomplete prose poem by Nikolai Gogol published in 1942. The novel satirizes elements of Russian society, especially the middle class and landowners, and contains themes of greed, pettiness, deception and the Russian national identity. The story follows Chichikov, a non-descript traveler who goes from town to town on an absurd quest to buy up "dead souls"--the names of serfs who have died but have not yet been reported dead in the census.