Dead Souls

We come now to the boldest and most central word in Gogol's design: Poema. It is clearly meant to alert readers to the author's own conception of his work, to warn them that what is to come is not a novel—that is, an extended prose narrative portraying characters and actions representative of real life, in a plot of more or less complexity, as the manuals have it. In fact, Gogol himself sometimes referred to Dead Souls as a novel, for instance in the letter to Pushkin quoted earlier. But that was precisely earlier. As his work progressed, his sense of it grew and changed. Finally, several times in the text itself, and here on its title page, he resolutely asserted its poemity.

Our understanding of what Gogol meant in calling his book a poem is helped considerably by a little manual he wrote himself in the latter part of his life. It is entitled A Guidebook of Literature for Russian Youth and contains, among other things, some interesting remarks on the novel as a genre. He describes it as "too static" a form, involving a set of characters introduced at the start and bound to a series of incidents necessarily related to the hero's fate, allowing only for an "overly compressed interaction" among them. If we reverse these strictures, we will have the begi

Many of those who heard Gogol read from the second volume of Dead Souls (some listened to as many as seven chapters) praised it in terms similar to those of his friend L. I. Arnoldi, who described such a reading in a memoir of his friendship with the author: “‘Amazing, incomparable!' I cried. 'In these chapters you come even closer to reality than in the first volume; here one senses life everywhere, as it is, without any exaggerations Could this be the same Gogol? Had he finally stooped to writing a conventional novel? But, in fact, what we find in the surviving fragments of volume 2 is not life "as it is," but a series of non-pareils—the perfect young lady, the perfect landowner, the perfect wealthy muzhik, the perfect prince, and also, since nonpareils need not be moral ideals, the perfect ruined nobleman, the perfect Germanizer, the perfect do-nothing—all of them verging on the grotesque, but on an unintentional and humorless grotesque. While we can see where Gogol was straining to go, we are aware mostly of the strain. He is still arm in arm with his hero at the end, but, as he says, "This was not the old Chichikov. This was some wreckage of the old Chichikov. The i

II

They'd plant it right, but what came up you couldn't say: it's not a watermelon, it's not a pumpkin, it's not a cucumber. . . devil knows what it is!

N. Gogol, The Enchanted Spot That genius was purely literary. Gogol was a born writer, and his minor epic is a major feast of Russian prose. It caused a sensation when it first appeared, almost all of its characters immediately became proverbial, and its reputation has never suffered an eclipse. The book entered into and became fused with Russian life, owing mainly to its verbal power. The poet I

Such qualities were largely ignored by the first critics of Dead Souls, who paid little attention to matters of style. They were most anxious to place Gogol's work within the social polemics of the time, to make him a partisan of one side or the other. Both sides stressed Gogol's "realism" (which we may find surprising), seeing his book as a living portrait of Russia, an embodiment of typical Russian life and of what, following Pushkin, they called "the Russian spirit" or "breath." Gogol represented the first appearance in Russian literature of everyday provincial life in all its details (Belinsky praised in particular the "executed" louse in chapter 8, seeing it as a challenge to literary gentility). Where the critics disagreed was on the character of that life and the nature of its appearance. The Slavophils saw the book as an image of deep Russia, "wooden" Russia, and saw in the figure of the coachman Selifan, for example, a portrait of the "unspoiled" Russian nature. They laughed merrily with Gogol. The radicals saw the book as an attack on landowners and bureaucrats, an unmasking of the social reality hypocritically denied by the ruling classes, and a denunciation of the evils of serf owning. For the Slavophils, Dead Souls was the first book fully to embrace Russian reality; for the radicals it represented Gogol's rejection of Russian reality and his (at least implicit) opposition to the established order. You may laugh at these characters in Gogol's book, wrote Belinsky, but you would not laugh at them in real life. The book is only superficially fu

Soviet Marxist criticism continued in Belinsky's line, adding its own ideological formulas. Thus Dead Souls turned out to be progressive in bringing out the contradictions latent in Russian society of the 1840s—the decay of the old feudal, serf-owning class, and the emergence of its class enemy, the capitalist, in the person of Chichikov (who is also contradictory and in transition). Its characters, representing broad and typical generalities of the time, are determined by their economic behavior—greed, prodigality, acquisitiveness, idleness. Gogol exposes the evils of arbitrary rule, bureaucratic corruption, and petty self-interest, and thus prepares the way for social change. And so on.