Which Russian author wrote Dead Souls?

Gogol, and the title is a pun on a bureaucratic fact: serfs were counted as souls for tax purposes, and landowners kept paying on those who had died between censuses. The novel's protagonist travels around buying dead serfs on paper, for a scheme, and the comedy comes from landowners trying to work out whether they are being cheated.

It is unfinished because Gogol burned it. He wrote a second part, fell under the influence of a severe priest who condemned his writing as sinful, burned the manuscript days before his death, and then refused food and died at 42 - a self-destruction that reads as religious mania and was recorded by his friends with horror.

He was Ukrainian, wrote in Russian, and is claimed by both literatures - a live argument that has sharpened considerably since 2022. His early work is full of Ukrainian folklore and village life, and Ukrainian writers have argued for a long time that reading him as simply Russian erases what he was actually writing about. Nabokov's book on him is worth the trouble: it argues that Gogol is not a realist at all, and that the world he describes only appears to be Russia.