Reading Order
Dead Souls Reading Order
Dead Souls (1842) by Nikolai Gogol is a comic satirical novel about Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a civil servant who travels the provincial Russian countryside purchasing the legal title to serfs who have died since the last census — 'dead souls' who are still registered as living property and therefore have a legal value that their owners are happy to sell for almost nothing. Chichikov's scheme is to use these dead souls as collateral for a mortgage, acquire a substantial loan, and use the loan to establish himself as a substantial landowner. The novel follows Chichikov through a series of encounters with provincial Russian landowners — each one a comic type whose moral and psychological failures Gogol satirizes with savage precision — and it is Gogol's central contribution to Russian literature: a panorama of provincial Russian life organized around an extended comic metaphor for the spiritual emptiness of both the serf-owning system and the human beings it has produced. Gogol intended Dead Souls as the first part of a three-volume work modeled on Dante's Commedia — Dead Souls was Inferno, and the subsequent volumes were to show Chichikov's Purgatorio and Paradiso — but he completed only the first volume and fragments of the second, which he burned shortly before his death.
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Dead Souls (1842)
Complete Dead Souls Book List
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Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol·1842
Dead Souls — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the scheme with 'dead souls' and how does it work?
In nineteenth-century Russia, serfs were counted in periodic censuses and registered as property. The 'soul tax' — a per-capita tax on male serfs — was levied on landowners based on the number of serfs registered in the last census, regardless of whether those serfs were still alive. Serfs who died between censuses continued to appear on the registry and were taxed to their owners until the next census. Chichikov's scheme is to buy the legal title to these 'dead souls' — useless to their owners, who are still paying tax on them — and then use the list of souls (which appears to be a list of living property) as security for a mortgage. The scheme is brilliant, illegal, and circular, and the novel's comedy comes from the encounters between Chichikov and the provincial landowners, each of whom reacts differently to the bizarre proposal.
Who are the major landowners in Dead Souls?
Gogol introduces a series of provincial landowners that have become archetypes in Russian literature. Manilov is a sentimentalist who dreams pleasantly and does nothing; Korobochka is a suspicious, narrow-minded woman who haggles over every kopeck; Nozdryov is a compulsive liar and gambler who is dangerous and completely unreliable; Sobakevich is a bearlike, practical man who refuses to be fooled and drives a hard bargain; Plyushkin is the most extreme — a miser of such pathological intensity that his estate has fallen into ruin and he himself has become indistinguishable from a peasant, hoarding useless junk in piles around his house. Each landowner is a 'dead soul' in the moral sense of the novel's title as well as in the legal sense that Chichikov exploits.
Why is Dead Souls so important in Russian literary history?
Dead Souls is the founding text of the tradition that became known as the 'critical realist' school of nineteenth-century Russian literature — the tradition of Turgenev, Goncharov, Ostrovsky, and eventually Chekhov, all of whom drew on Gogol's satirical portrait of provincial Russian life, his use of comic types, and his language (notoriously untranslatable, dense with wordplay, neologism, and rhythm). Dostoevsky's famous remark that 'we all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat' (referring to another Gogol work) has been generalized to Russian literature as a whole. The novel's central innovation — the sympathetic but relentlessly satirical portrait of a country's provincial life through the adventures of a picaresque hero — shaped the Russian novel for the rest of the century.
What happened to the second volume of Dead Souls?
Gogol worked on the second volume of Dead Souls for several years, producing a manuscript that he burned in 1845 when he fell into a religious crisis and became convinced that his art was sinful. He worked on it again over the following years, apparently completing at least a portion; but in February 1852, ten days before his death, he burned the manuscripts of the second volume a second time, destroying everything he had written. Five chapters survive in copies made before the burning, and these are published in most editions as the 'Second Volume' fragment; they show Chichikov beginning to experience something like genuine moral feeling. What the complete second volume would have been — the Purgatorio that would redeem both Chichikov and Gogol's art — is one of the great unanswerable questions of world literature.
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