What is the subtitle of Nikolai Gogol's 'Dead Souls'?

The subtitle of Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls” is “A Poem.”

Gogol presented the work as “Dead Souls: A Poem,” an unusual designation for a long prose narrative. He described it as an epic poem in prose, suggesting that its broad social vision and symbolic journey were more important to him than a conventional genre label.

The novel follows Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a former civil servant who travels through provincial Russia buying the names of serfs who have died but still appear on official census lists. By acquiring these “dead souls,” he hopes to present himself as a wealthy landowner and obtain social and financial advantages. The scheme exposes the absurdities of serfdom, bureaucracy, greed, and social status.

Gogol intended “Dead Souls” to become the first part of a three-volume work modeled in part on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” He destroyed much of the second part shortly before his death, and the surviving novel is often described as unfinished. Even so, its satire and comic gallery of landowners made it a landmark of nineteenth-century Russian literature.