The novella “Tarantas” was written a few years after Gogol’s “Dead Souls” and, in many ways, inherits from it. Two landowners—Vasiliy Ivanovich, a solid man of fifty years, and young Ivan Vasilyevich, freshly arrived from abroad—set off in a tarantas from Moscow to their villages beyond Kazan. On the way, Ivan Vasilyevich plans to thoroughly study Russia, so he brings along a notebook where he intends to jot down his travel impressions.