DEAD SOULS

A salesman travels across 19th century Russia, trying to convince rich landowners to sell him the title to their “dead souls”--peasant workers who have recently died. Every ten years there is a census, after which the government gives you a certain amount of money based on how many souls you have on paper working on your property. A novel for salesmen, hustlers, and scammers.

First Sentence:
“Through the gates of the inn in the provincial town of N. drove a rather handsome, smallish britzka, of the sort driven around in by bachelors: retired lieutenant colonels, staff captains, landowners possessed of some hundred peasant souls—in short, all those known as gentlemen of the middling sort.”