Dead Souls

Census confirmed on the Russian first: Moscow University Press, Moscow, 1842 is the true first. One refinement to the census wording: the first English-language appearance, 'Home Life in Russia. By a Russian Noble. Revised by the Editor of "Revelations of Siberia." In Two Volumes' (London: Hurst and Blackett, Successors to Henry Colburn, 13 Great Marlborough Street, 1854), is better described as an unauthorized and heavily doctored adaptation than as a piracy in the strict sense. It renders Part One only, with an altered ending, whole passages expunged and imaginative flourishes added, and was marketed to a Crimean-War-era British public as factual reportage on Russian life. Gogol is nowhere named on the title page — the attribution is to 'A Russian Noble' — and the volumes are bound in publisher's olive-green cloth, blind-stamped, spines lettered in gilt. It is itself a collected book alongside the Moscow 1842 first. Note that several dealer catalogues transcribe the title-page phrase as 'By a Russian Nobel'; the title page itself reads 'A RUSSIAN NOBLE' (verified against the 1854 scan), so treat 'Nobel' as a catalogue-transcription artifact rather than a point of issue.