Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov (Russian: Павел Иванович Чичиков) and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle-class of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book characterised it as a "novel in verse".

The character in today's short reading is having dinner with Chichikov, a middle official, who learns that there are dead souls to be bought.   Gogol presents the character Sobakevich, a bear of a man, who had a fiery red complexion.   

“It is well-known that there are many faces in the world over the finishing of which nature did not take much trouble, did not employ any fine tools such as files, gimlets, and so on, but simply hacked them out with round strokes: one chop-a nose appears; another chop-lips appear; eyes are scooped out with a big drill; and she lets it go into the world rough-hewn, saying: "It lives.”  Sobakevich held his head more down than up, he did not turn his neck at all, and because he could not turn it, he rarely looked at the person he was talking to, but instead at the corner of the stove or at the door."  Such detail!