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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Nikolai Gogol's 'Dead Souls' is a seminal work in Russian literature, first published in 1842. This satirical novel follows the protagonist Chichikov as he travels through the Russian countryside purchasing deceased serfs to exploit a legal loophole allowing him to acquire their souls and increase his social standing. Gogol's writing style is characterized by a blend of dark humor, vivid imagery, and sharp social commentary, making 'Dead Souls' a timeless classic that continues to resonate with readers today. The novel is considered a key text in the Russian literary tradition, influencing subsequent generations of writers and thinkers. Nikolai Gogol, known for his innovative storytelling and exploration of social issues, drew inspiration for 'Dead Souls' from his own observations of Russian society and bureaucracy. His keen insight into human nature and his ability to blend reality with the fantastical contribute to the enduring appeal of his work. I highly recommend 'Dead Souls' to readers interested in Russian literature, satire, and societal critique. Gogol's masterful storytelling and profound observations make this book a must-read for anyone seeking to delve into the complexities of 19th-century Russia and the universal themes of greed, morality, and redemption. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Dead Souls
(World's Classics Series)
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Across an empire plotted in ledgers and measured by milestones, a genial traveler learns to profit from what no longer breathes, and in doing so reveals how a civilization that tallies every head can lose sight of every heart, how laughter can peel back pomp to disclose anxiety, and how a scheme built on the emptiness of names exposes a deeper vacancy, the stubborn gap between living bodies and the paperwork that claims to represent them, between the restless road and parlor-room complacency, between official speech and private hunger—a journey where the most immaterial commodity illuminates the weight of a nation.
Dead Souls holds classic status because it renovates the comic novel into a diagnostic instrument, balancing exuberant invention with lucid social observation; its energy reshaped narrative possibilities for Russian prose and offered later writers a model for marrying satire with moral scrutiny. Readers return to it for the breadth of its portraiture and the intricacy of its voice: a narrator alternately playful, earnest, and confiding, who steers a road novel toward something like a national self-examination. Its laughter is durable, not topical; its critique, grounded in human habits rather than headlines, continues to register with rare clarity and amplitude.
Nikolai Gogol wrote Dead Souls in the late 1830s and early 1840s, publishing the first part in 1842. He labeled the book a poem, not to confuse genres but to signal scope: an ambition to contain multitudes while following a single traveler through provinces and parlors. The Russian Empire of the time organized peasant labor through serfdom and tallied populations by periodic revision lists. Those administrative facts provide the legal loophole that makes the plot possible. Gogol, already known for plays and stories that fused the uncanny with the ordinary, used this longer form to widen his satirical lens.
At the center stands Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, an urbane figure with impeccable manners and an obscure past, who arrives in a provincial town with a scheme both simple and audacious. He proposes to buy deceased serfs—still registered on the rolls and taxed to landowners until the next census—thereby relieving proprietors of an expense while amassing, on paper, a form of property he can later leverage for reputation and credit. The initial dealings, visits, and negotiations supply the book’s motion: a succession of encounters that introduce landowners, officials, and hangers-on, each revealing their own priorities, pretenses, and pockets of fear.
Formally, the book adopts the shape of a picaresque journey yet constantly questions the picaresque’s limits. The narrator pauses to sketch landscapes and digress on the nature of ambition; he builds character portraits from their furnishings, paperwork, and verbal tics; he shifts from burlesque to lyric meditation without losing momentum. Scenes unfold as social set pieces—the dinner, the carriage conversation, the bureaucratic audience—through which Chichikov’s politeness is both key and mirror, unlocking doors and reflecting back the language he hears. This orchestration allows Gogol to catalog a society while emphasizing the comedic elasticity and moral strain within it.
Because the book’s premise revolves around names on a list, it naturally probes the tension between enumeration and value. It asks what happens when human beings are treated as units of account, and how easily that habit survives even when the units in question are, literally, no longer alive. It considers the disguises people adopt to navigate status hierarchies, the language of flattery and suspicion, and the difference between an outwardly respectable plan and an inwardly disordered desire. Greed, vanity, and self-deception animate the comedy; vulnerability, loneliness, and a pervasive longing give the laughter an aftertaste that lingers.
The pages move from dusty inns to echoing official chambers to estates each arranged as an extension of an owner’s character. Weather and distance trouble travel, but the road also grants the narrative a freedom to assemble a panoramic cross-section of the provinces. The tone is a balance of carnival and elegy: caricature that remains humane, exuberance checked by a sense of waste. The social world depends on ceremony—the calling card, the formal visit, the word passed at supper—yet beneath ceremony lies anxiety about money, rank, and reputation. Gogol finds comedy in rituals and unease in their tiniest cracks.
Much of the book’s distinctive power flows from its language. Names are crafted to suggest habit or temperament; lists accumulate into comic climaxes; similes stretch until they surprise, then settle into exactness. By calling the work a poem, Gogol drew attention to rhythm, recurrence, and sound, even in prose. These features present translators with knotty choices: how to preserve wordplay, cadence, and tonal slippage without bloating or flattening. Yet the core effects survive across languages—the quicksilver wit of the narrator, the sly shifts in register, and the ability to turn administrative minutiae into scenes charged with theatrical life.
Dead Souls influenced the trajectory of the Russian novel by demonstrating that national satire could coexist with psychological suggestion, that a gallery of types could imply an ethical argument without preachiness. Later writers drew from its methods: the mingling of comic invention with moral unease, the narrator’s ability to hover between participants and audience, the use of a journey to frame a social panorama. Its example can be felt in nineteenth-century realists and in twentieth-century satirists who recognized that bureaucracy and fantasy often share a border. The book’s structural daring and tonal range widened what prose fiction could attempt.
Although envisioned on an expansive scale, the project arrived to readers first as a single published part in 1842. Gogol continued to work on a continuation, but the subsequent material did not reach a finished, canonical form before his death in 1852. This history matters because it clarifies the book’s open horizons: it is designed to radiate beyond its own pages, pointing outward to roads not yet traveled. Contemporary audiences noticed both its comic bravado and its sobering implications, and the work has since remained a touchstone for discussions of satire, national identity, and the craft of narration.
Within the World’s Classics series, the novel appears alongside works that shaped the conversation about what literature can do, and it rewards readers who approach it with patience for digression and relish for voice. The story’s scaffolding—visits, bargains, dinners—invites leisurely reading, but the prose also rewards close attention to small turns, where a sentence bends from irony to sympathy in a breath. For new readers, the central premise supplies immediate intrigue; for returning ones, the layered narration reveals fresh harmonies. Either way, the book’s place in a classics library feels both earned and continuously renewed.
Today, the book’s themes are legible in debates about data, credit, and the metrics by which institutions regard people. It explores how paperwork can eclipse personhood, how reputations are built from appearances, and how convenience can erode conscience, all while remaining entertaining at the level of scene and sentence. Chichikov’s itinerary across a regulated landscape speaks to modern experiences of systems that promise order yet generate moral fog. Readers find in these pages a comedy that clarifies, not distracts, and an inquiry into value that still feels urgent. Its laughter endures because its questions do not age.
Synopsis
Dead Souls, first published in 1842, is Nikolai Gogol’s satirical novel about provincial Russia at the height of serfdom. It follows the travels of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, an urbane newcomer whose polite manners mask a calculating purpose. Arriving in an unnamed guberniya town, he cultivates officials and landowners with practiced charm, while the narrator alternates close observation with expansive digressions that sketch a panorama of social types. The book’s premise is simple yet elastic: by tracing one man’s dealings across drawing rooms, estates, and offices, Gogol builds a comic, often unsettling portrait of a society ruled by appearance, habit, and paperwork.
Chichikov quickly ingratiates himself with the town’s leading figures, visiting the governor, police chief, and other dignitaries, then quietly begins his real business. He seeks to purchase from landowners the “dead souls” listed on recent censuses—serfs who have died but, until the next revision, still count for taxation and mortgages. Owners are eager to shed the tax burden; Chichikov aims to acquire large numbers cheaply, creating the semblance of wealth and leverage within the letter of the law. The plan depends on discretion, flattering conversation, and the complacency of a bureaucracy that translates human lives into entries on ledgers.
His first excursion is to the estate of Manilov, a hospitable dreamer whose gentle talk never resolves into action. The house is tastefully arranged, the master endlessly courteous, yet the atmosphere feels unreal, suspended in intentions and vague projects. Chichikov steers the conversation toward paperwork and census rolls, and Manilov—more eager to please than to understand—agrees to transfer deceased serfs for a token sum. This encounter sets the pattern for the novel’s gallery of types: each landowner embodies a social temperament that makes Chichikov’s request plausible, and each negotiation exposes the gap between genteel phrases and the stark arithmetic of serfdom.
At Korobochka’s farm, caution replaces suavity. The widowed proprietress, thrifty and suspicious of traders, measures every kopeck and mistrusts novelty. She badgers Chichikov with questions about prices and procedures, fears being cheated, and considers hauling samples to market before committing. Their haggling stretches into comic stalemate, revealing how insecurity and narrow experience can obstruct even a profitable escape from taxes. Gogol lingers over her pantry, storerooms, and hoarded produce, turning domestic clutter into a social portrait. Eventually, the visitor’s persistence and promises nudge the deal forward, but not without highlighting how the system’s absurdities weigh most heavily on the anxious.
The visit to Nozdryov introduces chaos. A swaggering gambler and braggart, he flaunts dogs, horses, and tall tales with the same reckless ease. Cards and drink blur conversation; boasts slide into threats; trades are proposed and withdrawn in a single breath. Chichikov’s plan, which depends on measured politeness, collides with Nozdryov’s appetite for wagers and spectacles. Gogol’s tone darkens under the farce, suggesting how violence and caprice lurk beneath convivial surfaces. The attempt to buy dead souls here fails noisily, and the traveler departs with his composure shaken, reminded that charm has limits when confronted by raw, undisciplined impulse.
Sobakevich presents another face of the countryside: heavy, practical, and unillusioned. His furniture and speech share a blunt solidity; he values people by their output and sees through euphemism. With him the negotiations become strictly commercial. He inventories the deceased serfs by trade and physique, arguing for prices as if valuing livestock or tools. Chichikov, encountering a counterpart who grasps the profits in paperwork, must concede more than he intended. The sale goes through, and the ledger grows. The episode underscores the novel’s central tension: when human beings are quantified by systems, moral discomfort can be smoothed into ordinary business.
The most striking estate belongs to Plyushkin, a miser sunk in isolation. His lands are neglected, buildings sag, servants drift, and the owner hoards refuse while wealth decays around him. Here Chichikov finds an abundance of names to acquire, and the bargain is easy. The grotesque melancholy of this stop deepens the book’s mood, connecting personal dereliction with the broader corrosion of institutions. Returning to town with documents in hand, Chichikov enjoys renewed attention at dinners and a grand ball. His carriage, expenditures, and ambiguous origins provoke curiosity, as admirers and rivals alike attempt to situate him within familiar hierarchies.
Curiosity turns to suspicion when news of his purchases spreads. The idea of buying dead serfs—the most impersonal of commodities—bewilders officialdom and gossip networks, which supply motives more sensational than bookkeeping. Speculation multiplies about his background, alliances, and intentions; minor misunderstandings harden into narratives. Chichikov’s carefully assembled façade begins to wobble as the town’s bureaucratic procedures and private resentments converge upon him. Facing unwelcome attention, he maneuvers to protect his standing and conclude his business, but the unraveling shows how fragile reputation is when built on ambiguity. The momentum carries him onward, away from the scene he briefly orchestrated.
Gogol frames these episodes with digressions on roads, labor, and the restless energy of a vast country, widening the comic tale into a meditation on national character. The resulting satire exposes how a regime of paperwork enables moral evasion, and how manners, vanity, and habit can mask the traffic in human lives. Surviving fragments of a later continuation suggest a shift toward moral testing and possible correction, but the core book stands as a capacious mirror of its time. Its enduring significance lies in the precision of its types, the elasticity of its narrator, and its unsparing view of systems that flatten persons into numbers.
Historical Context
Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls unfolds within the Russian Empire of the first half of the nineteenth century, primarily in provincial towns and estates far from the imperial capitals. The dominant institutions shaping this world were the Romanov autocracy, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the social order of estates anchored by serfdom. Daily life was organized by the Table of Ranks, which graded civil and military service and structured official hierarchies. Provincial society revolved around governors’ offices, courts, police, salons, and estates. This setting—vast distances, uneven wealth, and a bureaucracy mediating between center and locality—frames the novel’s satire of routine corruption, empty ritual, and the commodification of human lives.
Serfdom, legally entrenched since the seventeenth century, remained the backbone of the empire’s agrarian economy in Gogol’s time. Serfs owed labor dues (barshchina) or money payments (obrok) to landowners, who wielded broad authority over their lives. The system aligned state taxation with estate ownership: male serfs were counted for a per-capita poll tax, and their numbers underwrote noble status and credit. Dead Souls targets this institution by showing how persons could be reduced to entries on lists, quantified for taxes and collateral. The novel’s premise depends on the legal and fiscal logic of serfdom, exposing its moral contradictions without requiring explicit reformist polemic.
The novel’s title refers to the “dead souls” created by the empire’s periodic population audits, known as Revisions, conducted across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Between one Revision and the next, serfs who died remained on the official rolls. Because taxes were assessed from those lists, landowners continued to pay for the deceased until a new count. This bureaucratic lag produced both financial burdens and opportunities for manipulation. By the early 1830s, another Revision took place, yet time gaps and uneven administration persisted. Gogol’s plot leverages this administrative delay, illustrating how paper realities could diverge from life, enabling schemes that were formally legal yet ethically void.
Gogol’s portrait of officials draws on the Table of Ranks, instituted by Peter the Great in 1722 and still structuring careers under Nicholas I. The Table created incentives for advancement through formal service but also fostered dependency on patronage and routine. In provincial offices—governors’ chancelleries, courts, and police—paperwork multiplied, and bribery and favors often greased procedure. Dead Souls exaggerates nothing essential: petitions, seals, and ledgers dominate everyday governance; reputation and rank matter as much as competence. The novel’s bureaucrats embody a system where form frequently triumphs over substance, and where personal vanity and institutional inertia impede justice and efficiency.
The political climate of Nicholas I (reigned 1825–1855) is crucial. After the Decembrist uprising in 1825, the regime strengthened surveillance through the Third Section (established 1826) and tightened censorship. The official ideology, articulated in the 1830s as Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality, celebrated loyalty to throne and church and distrust of radical change. This atmosphere affected writers’ themes and tones, encouraging moralizing rhetoric and allegory while discouraging direct political critique. Dead Souls, published in 1842, navigates this environment by couching social criticism in humor, parable-like narration, and types rather than explicit attacks, thus engaging readers’ judgment while avoiding overt confrontation.
Censorship shaped the book’s path to print. Gogol had to submit manuscripts to imperial censors in St. Petersburg, who were wary of works satirizing officials and social estates. Framing the book as a “poem in prose” signaled ambition beyond simple lampoon, invoking a moral and national framework palatable to censors. Although precise cuts are not fully documented, contemporaries understood that the published text represented negotiation with authority. The result preserved the central conceit and many sharper scenes, yet its narrator’s digressions—on Russia’s destiny, on virtue and vulgarity—also reflect a discursive style that kept criticism within culturally acceptable limits.
The economic background features indebted nobility, estate mismanagement, and a credit system that allowed nobles to borrow against land and serfs. State-supported charitable councils and loan offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg advanced funds on the security of “souls,” treating them as collateral. At the same time, landowners bore the costs of taxes on serfs listed in the last Revision, even if those serfs had died. This combination made the transfer of names on paper—living or dead—economically meaningful. Gogol’s plot exploits these mechanisms, revealing how fiscal instruments and paperwork could detach property, credit, and status from actual productivity or human welfare.
Provincial gentry culture provided the social texture that Dead Souls scrutinizes. Estate owners held name-day gatherings, card parties, and dinners; gossip and display shaped reputations. French remained a prestige language among the upper classes, though many provincial nobles used it awkwardly, signaling aspiration and provinciality at once. Education was uneven, libraries eclectic, and reading habits shaped by fashion as much as conviction. Hospitality coexisted with social suspicion, and patronage determined careers. Gogol’s characters inhabit this milieu, where exaggerated politeness and vanity conceal precarious finances, and where rituals of civility can be turned to advantage by a skilled manipulator.
Transportation and communication technologies reinforced provincial isolation. Before railways spread, most long-distance travel relied on the postal system’s relay stations, troikas, and roads that were seasonally impassable. The first Russian railway, linking St. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo, opened in 1837, but such lines did not yet transform the vast interior. Letters could be delayed; newspapers arrived late. Dead Souls draws on the experience of slow journeys, roadside inns, and the chance encounters of coach travel. Physical distance and poor infrastructure made rumor powerful and information unreliable, fertile conditions for misunderstandings—and for schemes that thrived on paperwork rather than scrutiny.
Imperial administration in the provinces combined legal formality with practical improvisation. Governorates and districts maintained courts, police, and fiscal offices, but the quality of personnel varied, and oversight from the capital was intermittent. Public works advanced unevenly; town plans aimed at order yet coexisted with wooden suburbs vulnerable to fires. Charity boards, schools, and guardianship institutions existed, though resources and accountability were inconsistent. Gogol’s provincial town, with its ceremonious governor and jostling minor officials, reflects a pattern recognized by contemporary readers: institutions designed to embody imperial rationality, yet hampered by local patronage networks and the limited professionalization of civil service.
Agriculture dominated the economy. Grain, flax, and livestock production tied estates to regional fairs and export routes, notably the Nizhny Novgorod fair, reorganized after 1817 and a hub for trade. Price fluctuations, harvest risks, and transport costs pressed landowners to seek liquidity through credit. Some experimented with new methods; others relied on traditional obligations. Estate economies could be fragile, especially where managers were incompetent or absentee owners inattentive. In Dead Souls, inflated valuations and imaginative bookkeeping are not anomalies but symptoms of a wider system in which reports mattered as much as yields, and where a clever trader could profit from the gap between ledgers and reality.
Literary currents help situate Gogol’s method. Russian letters in the 1830s and 1840s moved from Romanticism toward critical realism, with satire as a bridge. Gogol had already lampooned officialdom in The Government Inspector (1836), whose performance scandalized some authorities and delighted many viewers. In Dead Souls, he extends satire into a long-form narrative that seeks national breadth while retaining comic sharpness. The work’s catalog of types—avaricious, faddish, pedantic—belongs to a European satiric tradition, yet its targets are distinctly Russian institutions and habits. The mixture of grotesque exaggeration and precise detail made the critique legible to contemporaries.
The 1840s saw intense debates among educated Russians often labeled Westernizers and Slavophiles. Both camps discussed serfdom, moral regeneration, and Russia’s path after the Napoleonic wars, disagreeing over the role of European models versus native traditions. Critics like Vissarion Belinsky championed social engagement in literature and praised Gogol’s early satire, later attacking his conservatism in 1847 when Gogol published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Dead Souls, appearing earlier, circulated within a reading public primed to interpret fiction as social analysis. Its reception reflected that climate: readers recognized in it both a biting portrait of abuses and a plea for moral awakening.
Gogol’s life fed the book’s texture. Born in 1809 in the Poltava region (in today’s Ukraine), he absorbed Ukrainian folklore in early writings yet worked mainly in St. Petersburg as a minor civil servant and teacher. He drew on bureaucratic experience for his satirical scenes. Pushkin reportedly suggested the plot’s core idea, and Gogol wrote much of Dead Souls in the late 1830s, including periods abroad in Rome. The first part appeared in 1842. He struggled to complete subsequent parts and, in 1852, burned a manuscript shortly before his death. These biographical facts underscore his ambivalence: both fascinated by Russia’s life and tormented by its moral ills.
Religion and morality formed an accepted language of public critique under Nicholas I. The Orthodox Church’s authority supported social hierarchy and obedience, yet Christian ideals of charity and repentance provided a framework to judge cruelty and greed. Gogol’s narrator often invokes moral categories—purity, baseness, spiritual awakening—rather than legal reforms. This rhetorical mode suited censorship constraints and reflected Gogol’s own evolving convictions. Dead Souls urges self-scrutiny among officials and landowners without prescribing statutes. The effect is to expose the spiritual poverty behind bureaucratic and economic practices, suggesting that institutional change without moral change would be superficial.
Russia’s post-Napoleonic international posture also matters. Victorious in 1812–1814, the empire emerged as a conservative great power committed to European order while wary of revolutionary ideas. Domestically, this stance translated into suspicion toward associations, press freedom, and political innovation. In such a context, satire and social comedy became safer vehicles for commentary than explicit political argument. Dead Souls exemplifies how a writer could mirror the empire’s contradictions—strength and stagnation, order and arbitrariness—while formally celebrating Russia’s potential greatness, a balance that allowed critique to coexist with professions of loyalty.
Legal and administrative tinkering with serfdom during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I provides further background. Measures such as the 1803 law allowing owners to free serfs as “free agriculturists” and the 1842 statute on “obligated peasants” aimed at limited improvements without abolishing bondage. Committees periodically studied the peasant question, but comprehensive emancipation arrived only in 1861, years after Gogol’s death. Dead Souls predates reform, dramatizing why partial adjustments could not cure systemic abuses. Its focus on paper fictions—names without lives, obligations without responsibility—highlights the gap between cosmetic policy and lived reality in the countryside and provinces, challenging complacent readers to reckon with that divide.
Author Biography
Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was a Ukrainian-born writer who became a central figure of nineteenth-century Russian-language literature. Active during the reign of Nicholas I and the rise of critical realism, he forged a distinctive blend of satire, the grotesque, and psychologically charged comedy. Gogol’s best-known works—among them the play The Government Inspector, the first part of the prose “poem” Dead Souls, and the Petersburg tales such as The Overcoat and The Nose—reshaped expectations of what prose and dramatic satire could do. His acute portraits of bureaucracy, moral confusion, and spiritual yearning influenced generations of writers within Russia and far beyond.
He was born in the Poltava region of the Russian Empire, in a milieu steeped in Ukrainian folklore and oral tradition, which supplied images and motifs for his early fiction. Gogol studied at the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences, where he read widely in history and European Romantic literature and tried his hand at poetry. In 1828 he moved to St. Petersburg, working briefly in the civil service and then teaching, while seeking a literary foothold. Entry into the capital’s journals and salons exposed him to debates about national culture and style, and he formed an important literary friendship with Alexander Pushkin.
Gogol’s first major success came with Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831–1832), two volumes of stories framed as folk anecdotes by a beekeeper narrator. Their comic brio and supernatural turns captivated readers and critics. He followed with Mirgorod (1835), which included the historical tale Taras Bulba alongside more somber provincial studies, and with the collection Arabesques (1835), containing essays and Petersburg stories such as Nevsky Prospekt and The Diary of a Madman. These books announced a writer able to unite folkloric wonder with social observation, shifting from village festivities and legends to the anxieties of urban clerks and artists.
The stage consolidated Gogol’s reputation. With encouragement from Pushkin, he wrote The Government Inspector (first staged in 1836), a corrosive farce about official corruption in a provincial town. The production provoked both laughter and outrage, as officials recognized themselves in its mirror. Around the same period he developed his Petersburg cycle of tales, including The Nose (1836) and, later, The Overcoat (1842), where incongruity shades into tragedy. These works refined his method: hyperbolic situations rendered in precise detail, a capricious narrative voice, and a vision of bureaucracy that deforms the individual. Admirers praised his originality; detractors saw dangerous mockery.
After the controversy of 1836, Gogol lived largely abroad for years, spending long periods in Germany and, especially, Italy, with Rome becoming a favored base. Away from official pressures, he planned a vast prose project about Russia’s moral condition. The first part of Dead Souls appeared in 1842, a traveling narrative whose protagonist schemes to acquire "souls" of deceased serfs to inflate his status. Gogol called it a "poem" to signal artistic ambition beyond satire. The book’s broad panorama—landowners, officials, townspeople—was widely recognized as a major achievement, though some objected to its dark emphasis. He continued to labor over its continuation.
In the 1840s Gogol’s religious preoccupations strengthened, shaping both his life and public stance. He published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847), a collection of letters and essays urging moral renewal through faith, obedience, and personal reform. Many readers, including leading critics, reacted sharply against its conservative tone; the debate placed Gogol at the center of Russia’s cultural quarrels. He undertook journeys for spiritual reasons and returned to Russia near the decade’s end. Struggling with illness and ascetic practices, he destroyed portions of the continuation of Dead Souls shortly before his death in Moscow in 1852, leaving the project unfinished.
Gogol’s legacy is unusually broad. His fusion of comic excess with moral unease helped seed Russian realism while opening paths toward modernist absurdity and psychological fiction. Later writers—among them Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and many outside Russia—engaged his methods of estrangement, unreliable narration, and satirical exposure of systems. The Government Inspector remains a theatrical staple; The Overcoat and other tales are continually translated and adapted for stage and screen. Scholars read him today as a writer of borderlands, shaped by Ukrainian cultural sources and imperial contexts, whose portrayals of bureaucracy, status anxiety, and spiritual thirst still feel strikingly current.
Dead Souls (World's Classics Series)
Introduction
Dead Souls[1], first published in 1842, is the great prose classic of Russia. That amazing institution, “the Russian novel,” not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work by the same author, a short story entitled The Cloak; this idea has been wittily expressed by another compatriot, who says: “We have all issued out of Gogol’s Cloak.”
Dead Souls, which bears the word “Poem” upon the title page of the original, has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the Pickwick Papers, while E. M. Vogue places its author somewhere between Cervantes and Le Sage. However considerable the influences of Cervantes and Dickens may have been—the first in the matter of structure, the other in background, humour, and detail of characterisation—the predominating and distinguishing quality of the work is undeniably something foreign to both and quite peculiar to itself; something which, for want of a better term, might be called the quality of the Russian soul. The English reader familiar with the works of Dostoieffsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoi, need hardly be told what this implies; it might be defined in the words of the French critic just named as “a tendency to pity.” One might indeed go further and say that it implies a certain tolerance of one’s characters even though they be, in the conventional sense, knaves, products, as the case might be, of conditions or circumstance, which after all is the thing to be criticised and not the man. But pity and tolerance are rare in satire, even in clash with it, producing in the result a deep sense of tragic humour. It is this that makes of Dead Souls a unique work, peculiarly Gogolian, peculiarly Russian, and distinct from its author’s Spanish and English masters.
Still more profound are the contradictions to be seen in the author’s personal character; and unfortunately they prevented him from completing his work. The trouble is that he made his art out of life, and when in his final years he carried his struggle, as Tolstoi did later, back into life, he repented of all he had written, and in the frenzy of a wakeful night burned all his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls, only fragments of which were saved. There was yet a third part to be written. Indeed, the second part had been written and burned twice. Accounts differ as to why he had burned it finally. Religious remorse, fury at adverse criticism, and despair at not reaching ideal perfection are among the reasons given. Again it is said that he had destroyed the manuscript with the others inadvertently.
The poet Pushkin, who said of Gogol that “behind his laughter you feel the unseen tears,” was his chief friend and inspirer. It was he who suggested the plot of Dead Souls as well as the plot of the earlier work The Revisor, which is almost the only comedy in Russian. The importance of both is their introduction of the social element in Russian literature, as Prince Kropotkin points out. Both hold up the mirror to Russian officialdom and the effects it has produced on the national character. The plot of Dead Souls is simple enough, and is said to have been suggested by an actual episode.
It was the day of serfdom in Russia, and a man’s standing was often judged by the numbers of “souls” he possessed. There was a periodical census of serfs, say once every ten or twenty years. This being the case, an owner had to pay a tax on every “soul” registered at the last census, though some of the serfs might have died in the meantime. Nevertheless, the system had its material advantages, inasmuch as an owner might borrow money from a bank on the “dead souls” no less than on the living ones. The plan of Chichikov, Gogol’s hero-villain, was therefore to make a journey through Russia and buy up the “dead souls,” at reduced rates of course, saving their owners the government tax, and acquiring for himself a list of fictitious serfs, which he meant to mortgage to a bank for a considerable sum. With this money he would buy an estate and some real life serfs, and make the beginning of a fortune.
Obviously, this plot, which is really no plot at all but merely a ruse to enable Chichikov to go across Russia in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. “The comic,” explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, “is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, on the stage say, we shall roll about with laughter and only wonder we did not notice it before.” But the comic in Dead Souls is merely external. Let us see how Pushkin, who loved to laugh, regarded the work. As Gogol read it aloud to him from the manuscript the poet grew more and more gloomy and at last cried out: “God! What a sad country Russia is!” And later he said of it: “Gogol invents nothing; it is the simple truth, the terrible truth.”
The work on one hand was received as nothing less than an exposure of all Russia—what would foreigners think of it? The liberal elements, however, the critical Belinsky among them, welcomed it as a revelation, as an omen of a freer future. Gogol, who had meant to do a service to Russia and not to heap ridicule upon her, took the criticisms of the Slavophiles to heart; and he palliated his critics by promising to bring about in the succeeding parts of his novel the redemption of Chichikov and the other “knaves and blockheads.” But the “Westerner” Belinsky and others of the liberal camp were mistrustful. It was about this time (1847) that Gogol published his Correspondence with Friends, and aroused a literary controversy that is alive to this day. Tolstoi is to be found among his apologists.
Opinions as to the actual significance of Gogol’s masterpiece differ. Some consider the author a realist who has drawn with meticulous detail a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him a great symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe the living of Russia as well as its dead. Chichikov himself is now generally regarded as a universal character. We find an American professor, William Lyon Phelps1, of Yale, holding the opinion that “no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of his tongue.” This is also the opinion held by Prince Kropotkin2, who says: “Chichikov may buy dead souls, or railway shares, or he may collect funds for some charitable institution, or look for a position in a bank, but he is an immortal international type; we meet him everywhere; he is of all lands and of all times; he but takes different forms to suit the requirements of nationality and time.”
Again, the work bears an interesting relation to Gogol himself. A romantic, writing of realities, he was appalled at the commonplaces of life, at finding no outlet for his love of colour derived from his Cossack ancestry. He realised that he had drawn a host of “heroes,” “one more commonplace than another, that there was not a single palliating circumstance, that there was not a single place where the reader might find pause to rest and to console himself, and that when he had finished the book it was as though he had walked out of an oppressive cellar into the open air.” He felt perhaps inward need to redeem Chichikov; in Merejkovsky’s opinion he really wanted to save his own soul, but had succeeded only in losing it. His last years were spent morbidly; he suffered torments and ran from place to place like one hunted; but really always running from himself. Rome was his favourite refuge, and he returned to it again and again. In 1848, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but he could find no peace for his soul. Something of this mood had reflected itself even much earlier in the Memoirs of a Madman: “Oh, little mother, save your poor son! Look how they are tormenting him.... There’s no place for him on earth! He’s being driven!... Oh, little mother, take pity on thy poor child.”
All the contradictions of Gogol’s character are not to be disposed of in a brief essay. Such a strange combination of the tragic and the comic was truly seldom seen in one man. He, for one, realised that “it is dangerous to jest with laughter.” “Everything that I laughed at became sad.” “And terrible,” adds Merejkovsky. But earlier his humour was lighter, less tinged with the tragic; in those days Pushkin never failed to be amused by what Gogol had brought to read to him. Even Revizor (1835), with its tragic undercurrent, was a trifle compared to Dead Souls, so that one is not astonished to hear that not only did the Tsar, Nicholas I, give permission to have it acted, in spite of its being a criticism of official rottenness, but laughed uproariously, and led the applause. Moreover, he gave Gogol a grant of money, and asked that its source should not be revealed to the author lest “he might feel obliged to write from the official point of view.”
Gogol was born at Sorotchinetz, Little Russia, in March 1809. He left college at nineteen and went to St. Petersburg, where he secured a position as copying clerk in a government department. He did not keep his position long, yet long enough to store away in his mind a number of bureaucratic types which proved useful later. He quite suddenly started for America with money given to him by his mother for another purpose, but when he got as far as Lubeck he turned back. He then wanted to become an actor, but his voice proved not strong enough. Later he wrote a poem which was unkindly received. As the copies remained unsold, he gathered them all up at the various shops and burned them in his room.
His next effort, Evenings at the Farm of Dikanka (1831) was more successful. It was a series of gay and colourful pictures of Ukraine, the land he knew and loved, and if he is occasionally a little over romantic here and there, he also achieves some beautifully lyrical passages. Then came another even finer series called Mirgorod, which won the admiration of Pushkin. Next he planned a “History of Little Russia” and a “History of the Middle Ages,” this last work to be in eight or nine volumes. The result of all this study was a beautiful and short Homeric epic in prose, called Taras Bulba. His appointment to a professorship in history was a ridiculous episode in his life. After a brilliant first lecture, in which he had evidently said all he had to say, he settled to a life of boredom for himself and his pupils. When he resigned he said joyously: “I am once more a free Cossack.” Between 1834 and 1835 he produced a new series of stories, including his famous Cloak, which may be regarded as the legitimate beginning of the Russian novel.
Gogol knew little about women, who played an equally minor role in his life and in his books. This may be partly because his personal appearance was not prepossessing. He is described by a contemporary as “a little man with legs too short for his body. He walked crookedly; he was clumsy, ill-dressed, and rather ridiculous-looking, with his long lock of hair flapping on his forehead, and his large prominent nose.”
From 1835 Gogol spent almost his entire time abroad; some strange unrest—possibly his Cossack blood—possessed him like a demon, and he never stopped anywhere very long. After his pilgrimage in 1848 to Jerusalem, he returned to Moscow, his entire possessions in a little bag; these consisted of pamphlets, critiques, and newspaper articles mostly inimical to himself. He wandered about with these from house to house. Everything he had of value he gave away to the poor. He ceased work entirely. According to all accounts he spent his last days in praying and fasting. Visions came to him. His death, which came in 1852, was extremely fantastic. His last words, uttered in a loud frenzy, were: “A ladder! Quick, a ladder!” This call for a ladder—“a spiritual ladder,” in the words of Merejkovsky—had been made on an earlier occasion by a certain Russian saint, who used almost the same language. “I shall laugh my bitter laugh”3 was the inscription placed on Gogol’s grave.
(JOHN COURNOS)
From the Author to the Reader
Reader, whosoever or wheresoever you be, and whatsoever be your station—whether that of a member of the higher ranks of society or that of a member of the plainer walks of life—I beg of you, if God shall have given you any skill in letters, and my book shall fall into your hands, to extend to me your assistance.
For in the book which lies before you, and which, probably, you have read in its first edition, there is portrayed a man who is a type taken from our Russian Empire. This man travels about the Russian land and meets with folk of every condition—from the nobly-born to the humble toiler. Him I have taken as a type to show forth the vices and the failings, rather than the merits and the virtues, of the commonplace Russian individual; and the characters which revolve around him have also been selected for the purpose of demonstrating our national weaknesses and shortcomings. As for men and women of the better sort, I propose to portray them in subsequent volumes. Probably much of what I have described is improbable and does not happen as things customarily happen in Russia; and the reason for that is that for me to learn all that I have wished to do has been impossible, in that human life is not sufficiently long to become acquainted with even a hundredth part of what takes place within the borders of the Russian Empire. Also, carelessness, inexperience, and lack of time have led to my perpetrating numerous errors and inaccuracies of detail; with the result that in every line of the book there is something which calls for correction. For these reasons I beg of you, my reader, to act also as my corrector. Do not despise the task, for, however superior be your education, and however lofty your station, and however insignificant, in your eyes, my book, and however trifling the apparent labour of correcting and commenting upon that book, I implore you to do as I have said. And you too, O reader of lowly education and simple status, I beseech you not to look upon yourself as too ignorant to be able in some fashion, however small, to help me. Every man who has lived in the world and mixed with his fellow men will have remarked something which has remained hidden from the eyes of others; and therefore I beg of you not to deprive me of your comments, seeing that it cannot be that, should you read my book with attention, you will have NOTHING to say at some point therein.
For example, how excellent it would be if some reader who is sufficiently rich in experience and the knowledge of life to be acquainted with the sort of characters which I have described herein would annotate in detail the book, without missing a single page, and undertake to read it precisely as though, laying pen and paper before him, he were first to peruse a few pages of the work, and then to recall his own life, and the lives of folk with whom he has come in contact, and everything which he has seen with his own eyes or has heard of from others, and to proceed to annotate, in so far as may tally with his own experience or otherwise, what is set forth in the book, and to jot down the whole exactly as it stands pictured to his memory, and, lastly, to send me the jottings as they may issue from his pen, and to continue doing so until he has covered the entire work! Yes, he would indeed do me a vital service! Of style or beauty of expression he would need to take no account, for the value of a book lies in its truth and its actuality rather than in its wording. Nor would he need to consider my feelings if at any point he should feel minded to blame or to upbraid me, or to demonstrate the harm rather than the good which has been done through any lack of thought or verisimilitude of which I have been guilty. In short, for anything and for everything in the way of criticism I should be thankful.
Also, it would be an excellent thing if some reader in the higher walks of life, some person who stands remote, both by life and by education, from the circle of folk which I have pictured in my book, but who knows the life of the circle in which he himself revolves, would undertake to read my work in similar fashion, and methodically to recall to his mind any members of superior social classes whom he has met, and carefully to observe whether there exists any resemblance between one such class and another, and whether, at times, there may not be repeated in a higher sphere what is done in a lower, and likewise to note any additional fact in the same connection which may occur to him (that is to say, any fact pertaining to the higher ranks of society which would seem to confirm or to disprove his conclusions), and, lastly, to record that fact as it may have occurred within his own experience, while giving full details of persons (of individual manners, tendencies, and customs) and also of inanimate surroundings (of dress, furniture, fittings of houses, and so forth). For I need knowledge of the classes in question, which are the flower of our people. In fact, this very reason—the reason that I do not yet know Russian life in all its aspects, and in the degree to which it is necessary for me to know it in order to become a successful author—is what has, until now, prevented me from publishing any subsequent volumes of this story.
Again, it would be an excellent thing if some one who is endowed with the faculty of imagining and vividly picturing to himself the various situations wherein a character may be placed, and of mentally following up a character’s career in one field and another—by this I mean some one who possesses the power of entering into and developing the ideas of the author whose work he may be reading—would scan each character herein portrayed, and tell me how each character ought to have acted at a given juncture, and what, to judge from the beginnings of each character, ought to have become of that character later, and what new circumstances might be devised in connection therewith, and what new details might advantageously be added to those already described. Honestly can I say that to consider these points against the time when a new edition of my book may be published in a different and a better form would give me the greatest possible pleasure.
One thing in particular would I ask of any reader who may be willing to give me the benefit of his advice. That is to say, I would beg of him to suppose, while recording his remarks, that it is for the benefit of a man in no way his equal in education, or similar to him in tastes and ideas, or capable of apprehending criticisms without full explanation appended, that he is doing so. Rather would I ask such a reader to suppose that before him there stands a man of incomparably inferior enlightenment and schooling—a rude country bumpkin whose life, throughout, has been passed in retirement—a bumpkin to whom it is necessary to explain each circumstance in detail, while never forgetting to be as simple of speech as though he were a child, and at every step there were a danger of employing terms beyond his understanding. Should these precautions be kept constantly in view by any reader undertaking to annotate my book, that reader’s remarks will exceed in weight and interest even his own expectations, and will bring me very real advantage.
Thus, provided that my earnest request be heeded by my readers, and that among them there be found a few kind spirits to do as I desire, the following is the manner in which I would request them to transmit their notes for my consideration. Inscribing the package with my name, let them then enclose that package in a second one addressed either to the Rector of the University of St. Petersburg[2] or to Professor Shevirev of the University of Moscow, according as the one or the other of those two cities may be the nearer to the sender.
Lastly, while thanking all journalists and litterateurs for their previously published criticisms of my book—criticisms which, in spite of a spice of that intemperance and prejudice which is common to all humanity, have proved of the greatest use both to my head and to my heart—I beg of such writers again to favour me with their reviews. For in all sincerity I can assure them that whatsoever they may be pleased to say for my improvement and my instruction will be received by me with naught but gratitude.
Part I
Chapter I
To the door of an inn in the provincial town of N. there drew up a smart britchka[3]—a light spring-carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, land-owners possessed of about a hundred souls, and, in short, all persons who rank as gentlemen of the intermediate category. In the britchka was seated such a gentleman—a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young. His arrival produced no stir in the town, and was accompanied by no particular incident, beyond that a couple of peasants who happened to be standing at the door of a dramshop exchanged a few comments with reference to the equipage rather than to the individual who was seated in it. “Look at that carriage,” one of them said to the other. “Think you it will be going as far as Moscow?” “I think it will,” replied his companion. “But not as far as Kazan, eh?” “No, not as far as Kazan.” With that the conversation ended. Presently, as the britchka was approaching the inn, it was met by a young man in a pair of very short, very tight breeches of white dimity, a quasi-fashionable frockcoat, and a dickey fastened with a pistol-shaped bronze tie-pin. The young man turned his head as he passed the britchka and eyed it attentively; after which he clapped his hand to his cap (which was in danger of being removed by the wind) and resumed his way. On the vehicle reaching the inn door, its occupant found standing there to welcome him the polevoi, or waiter, of the establishment—an individual of such nimble and brisk movement that even to distinguish the character of his face was impossible. Running out with a napkin in one hand and his lanky form clad in a tailcoat, reaching almost to the nape of his neck, he tossed back his locks, and escorted the gentleman upstairs, along a wooden gallery, and so to the bedchamber which God had prepared for the gentleman’s reception. The said bedchamber was of quite ordinary appearance, since the inn belonged to the species to be found in all provincial towns—the species wherein, for two roubles a day, travellers may obtain a room swarming with black-beetles, and communicating by a doorway with the apartment adjoining. True, the doorway may be blocked up with a wardrobe; yet behind it, in all probability, there will be standing a silent, motionless neighbour whose ears are burning to learn every possible detail concerning the latest arrival. The inn’s exterior corresponded with its interior[1q]. Long, and consisting only of two storeys, the building had its lower half destitute of stucco; with the result that the dark-red bricks, originally more or less dingy, had grown yet dingier under the influence of atmospheric changes. As for the upper half of the building, it was, of course, painted the usual tint of unfading yellow. Within, on the ground floor, there stood a number of benches heaped with horse-collars, rope, and sheepskins; while the window-seat accommodated a sbitentshik[4]4, cheek by jowl with a samovar5—the latter so closely resembling the former in appearance that, but for the fact of the samovar possessing a pitch-black lip, the samovar and the sbitentshik might have been two of a pair.
During the traveller’s inspection of his room his luggage was brought into the apartment. First came a portmanteau of white leather whose raggedness indicated that the receptacle had made several previous journeys. The bearers of the same were the gentleman’s coachman, Selifan (a little man in a large overcoat), and the gentleman’s valet, Petrushka—the latter a fellow of about thirty, clad in a worn, over-ample jacket which formerly had graced his master’s shoulders, and possessed of a nose and a pair of lips whose coarseness communicated to his face rather a sullen expression. Behind the portmanteau came a small dispatch-box of redwood, lined with birch bark, a boot-case, and (wrapped in blue paper) a roast fowl; all of which having been deposited, the coachman departed to look after his horses, and the valet to establish himself in the little dark anteroom or kennel where already he had stored a cloak, a bagful of livery, and his own peculiar smell. Pressing the narrow bedstead back against the wall, he covered it with the tiny remnant of mattress—a remnant as thin and flat (perhaps also as greasy) as a pancake—which he had managed to beg of the landlord of the establishment.
While the attendants had been thus setting things straight the gentleman had repaired to the common parlour. The appearance of common parlours of the kind is known to every one who travels. Always they have varnished walls which, grown black in their upper portions with tobacco smoke, are, in their lower, grown shiny with the friction of customers’ backs—more especially with that of the backs of such local tradesmen as, on market-days, make it their regular practice to resort to the local hostelry for a glass of tea. Also, parlours of this kind invariably contain smutty ceilings, an equally smutty chandelier, a number of pendent shades which jump and rattle whenever the waiter scurries across the shabby oilcloth with a trayful of glasses (the glasses looking like a flock of birds roosting by the seashore), and a selection of oil paintings. In short, there are certain objects which one sees in every inn. In the present case the only outstanding feature of the room was the fact that in one of the paintings a nymph was portrayed as possessing breasts of a size such as the reader can never in his life have beheld. A similar caricaturing of nature is to be noted in the historical pictures (of unknown origin, period, and creation) which reach us—sometimes through the instrumentality of Russian magnates who profess to be connoisseurs of art—from Italy; owing to the said magnates having made such purchases solely on the advice of the couriers who have escorted them.
