Dead Souls in particular is an attempt to extend to the Russian tradition a conception of the novel wide enough to encompass the innovations of Cervantes in Don Quixote by making the novel serve as a massive, imaginative criticism of life. Both books, viewed by contemporaries with dismay, have proven to be far from outlandish exceptions to the rules, however, but have found themselves more and more regarded from the perspective of literary modernism on fiction's main track in their astonishing verbal display and radical redefinition of plot and character. Both are regarded as comic masterworks that achieve their dazzling effects by challenging and extending novelistic boundaries. Dead Souls, like Tristram Shandy, comes early in its country's novel tradition, in Gogol's case, taking pride of place as Russia's first great novel. Like English literature's most eccentric novel, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Gogol's Dead Souls continues both to impress and perplex.
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