Dead Souls

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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol

Literature

Aug 8, 2018

In the library of great nineteenth-century Russian novels, Dead Souls stands out as the most bizarre, eclipsing in its strangeness even the tortured subjectivity of Dostoevsky’s most fervid pages. Proceeding from an outrageous comic premise, Dead Souls hastens through the Russian landscape with demoniacal energy, its author probing provincial life with keen observations of character and custom even as he explodes the boundaries of realism with fantastical impressions and inventions. Gogol’s protagonist is Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a swindler who moves through the countryside working an ingenious scam. Landowners of the time could buy and sell the serfs who worked their estates; these peasants were known as “souls,” and the landowners paid a government tax on each of them. When a peasant died, however, the tax still had to be paid until the next census—the soul remained on the books. Chichikov’s ghoulish scheme is to buy these “dead souls” and, while they remained in bookkeeping limbo, mortgage them as if they were live chattel. Through it all, Gogol’s eye for human folly never fails, and it is that alertness that gives the book its outsize animation.

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James O'Doherty

Feb 24, 2019

Slow moving and clumsy in some of its construction, yet the comedy and satire of tsarist Russia is razor-sharp

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