{"id":1467,"date":"2006-05-01T16:02:34","date_gmt":"2006-05-01T16:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2006\/05\/dead_souls_by_n\/"},"modified":"2006-05-01T16:02:34","modified_gmt":"2006-05-01T16:02:34","slug":"dead_souls_by_n","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/dead_souls_by_n\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll freely admit that I&#8217;m not exactly <em>up<\/em> on my Russian fiction, so I came to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dead_Souls\">Dead Souls<\/a> quite fresh. Narrated by Michael Palin, who &#8220;appears&#8221; in the story, he accompanies Chichikov as he goes about his way trying to buy dead peasants. Chichikov, played expertly by Mark (Spaced, Green Wing) Heap, has a scheme that involves accumulating wealth by owning these peasants &#8211; since they&#8217;re taxable even if they&#8217;re dead, between censuses. He can then borrow against them to gain vast wealth. When he defaults on the repayment, his debtors will take ownership of this property &#8211; the dead souls.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s quite a playful version of the story that&#8217;s been adapted in a very modern manner &#8211; there&#8217;s even a joke about Kishishev (of Charlton Athletic) &#8211; but unlike the recent <a href=\"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/001589.html\">Jeeves and Wooster<\/a>, the up-to-dateness of the production doesn&#8217;t get in the way of the story.<br \/>\nThoroughly recommended. If you&#8217;re reading this before the evening of Saturday May 6 2006, you can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/radio4\/arts\/classic_serial.shtml\">listen again<\/a> to both episodes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll freely admit that I&#8217;m not exactly up on my Russian fiction, so I came to Dead Souls quite fresh. Narrated by Michael Palin, who &#8220;appears&#8221; in the story, he accompanies Chichikov as he goes about his way trying to buy dead peasants. Chichikov, played expertly by Mark (Spaced, Green Wing) Heap, has a scheme [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}