Dead Souls

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852) - a famous prose writer and playwright, a classic of Russian literature.
About his own work, Gogol said: "Only what was taken from reality came out well for me." The writer often turned to myths, legends, and... other folkloric sources, which is why the real world in his works often intertwined with the fantastic.
The poem "Dead Souls" was originally intended as a guide to goodness and was supposed to consist of three parts, which would have been a kind of repetition of the "Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso" by Dante. As is known, the third part was not started, and only drafts of the second remained, which led to the emergence of many different legends. One of them states that the unpublished volume is stored among the papers of a former contemporary of the writer.