Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 1984
Dead Souls (1984 film)
Buy Dead Souls (1984 film) now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'Dead Souls' is a 1984 Soviet television miniseries directed by Mikhail Schweitzer, based on Nikolai Gogol's epic poem of the same name. This story has been shared in many different interpretations. In 1930, author Mikhail Bulgakov was commissioned to write the first adaptation of this novel for the Soviet stage at the Moscow Art Theater. The 1984 miniseries was based on the 1960 film adaptation directed by Leonid Trauberg, which was inspired the Moscow Art Theater script. This story was also adapted as an opera in the 1980s as an American-Soviet production that first opened in Boston. The first cinematic interpretation of this work was directed by Pyotr Chardynin in 1909.
Synopsis
This is a small-screen rendering of Gogol's epic poem critiquing the class system in 19th-century Russia by the same name. In this film, main character Tchitchikov travels through the countryside buying dead souls, or serfs who had deceased. By purchasing the deed to these "property," Tchitchikov is able to improve his social standing at a discount as these individuals were still accounted for in property registers postmortem and the rights to ownership for deceased serfs was less than that of the living. Dead Souls is a critique and satire of middle class life in Imperial Russia.
Cast
* Aleksandr Trofimov Nikolai Gogol
* Aleksandr Kalyagin Chichikov
* Yuri Bogatyryov Manilov
* Larisa Udovichenko Manilov's wife
* Tamara Nosova Korobochka
* Vitali Shapovalov Nozdryov
* Aleksei Zaitsev Selifan
* Viktor Sergachyov Mizhuyev, Son-in-law
* Maria Vinogradova Mavra
* Innokenty Smoktunovsky Plushkin
* Vyacheslav Nevinny Sobakevich
* Yuri Volyntsev Alexei Ivanovich, Chief of Police
* Inna Churikova Lady, nice in every respect
* Lidiya Fedoseyeva-Shukshina Lady, just nice
* Irina Malysheva Governor's daughter
* Yelizaveta Nikishchikhina Sobakevich's wife
* Valeri Malyshev Mikhei
* Aleksei Safonov Public prosecutor
References
Buy Dead Souls (1984 film) now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 1984