High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Dead Soul by Nikolai Gogol was first published in 1842, and is considered one of the most prominent works of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose," and within the book as a "novel in verse." Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol destroyed it shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence, it is usually regarded as complete in the extant form.