THE BLOGFATHER, AS IT WERE: Well, despite the Moscow Times' not so great review of this translation of Dead Souls, I think everyone should read Gogol in as good a translation as you can get your hands on. He is worth the reading, although I might be a tad prejudiced (my nom de blog derives from a Gogol story, for those of you who didn't already know that).

If you're looking for a good introduction to Gogol, let me suggest The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, whose translation of Dead Souls is the one the Times is slamming with faint praise in the link above. It is impossible, of course, to catch all the Russian wordplay in English, but you can discern enough to know that a wonderfully comic mind is at play and that all you have to do to keep up with that mind, always assuming that you can keep up, on its adventures through 19th century Russia is to simply keep reading.