Rating: 
Summary: Moral Rot and Mordant Wit
Review: Dead Souls is an interesting selection for several reasons. Above and beyond its commentary on the topical issues of Gogol's days (serfdom and the slow reforms thereof), sociopolitical satire, and uncommonly maladroit and unsympathetic hero, the book is an important exhibit in the evolution of the Russian language and the solidification of Russian literature.Chichikov, a Russian customs civil servant, rides his troika into N., an unnamed provincial anytown. His intentions unknown, Chichikov effortlessly wins the hearts of the seemingly superficial officials and landowners, whose hospitality and good cheer seem boundless. Chichikov, though, is courting the kind citizens with a purpose. Soon, he is traveling from house to manor, offering to buy deeds to dead peasants for reasons unknown. With Chichikov's travels through the Russian countryside, Gogol unleashes his comic insight into Russian society, especially (and unlike many of his shorter stories), rural Russia. Soon, the good hosts are exposed as guileful misers and the munificent oficials as venal and depraved. The sharpest comic exchanges come in Chichikov's haggles with the more incredulous targets - notably, a woman who preposterously suspects a hidden value in dead souls, and Sobakevich - a man bearing more than physical resemblance to a bear. At the same time, Dead Souls paints for us an unorthodox hero in Chichikov - a morally unscupulous bureaucrat whose only ambition is financial aggrandizement. Relegated to mediocrity since childhood, Chichikov pursues the crass goals set out by his dysfunctional father. Yet Chichikov is not a man, he is a state of mind - one that Gogol saw afflicting much of his beloved Russia. Through Chichikov, and with great humor, Gogol illuminates the decay of human relations and decency in a country and people he loved so dearly.
Rating: 
Summary: Gogol's Maniacal Magnificence
Review: Gogol's "Dead Souls" is an amazing, if incomplete, novel. I would say it is about a fellow named Chichikov, but that would not be true. The novel is about Russia. In "Dead Souls" we see that Gogol loved Russia so much, it drove him mad trying to find a way to save it. The novel is entrancing, moving seamlessly between minute particularity to epic scope, as it takes all of Russia under its gaze. At times, the tone is satirical, angry, comic, even desperate - but always with a wistful fondness that should be apparent to the observant reader. Chichikov, the hero of Gogol's epic poem, shows the influence of Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," a novel with which Gogol was familiar. Like Shandy, we know little about Chichikov until well into the novel. This narrative indirection allows us more insight into the other characters and the conditions of Russia after the Napoleonic wars. Chichikov is a minor gentleman, who, having served in various government positions, decides to pursue the life of a land-owner. His scheme is to traverse Russia, gathering the legal rights to serfs who have died on estates since the last census. By turning an accumulated list of these 'dead souls' over to the government, he plans to make a small fortune, which he will use to buy an estate. While Chichikov may appear to be a morally questionable swindler, like Herman Melville's "Confidence-Man," he does have noble motivations, despite his methods. Chichikov seeks what each person seeks, according to Gogol - to have a family, to do honor to one's country. Although his plan can seem to be a ludicrous, last-ditch sort of effort at establishing himself, Chichikov is, throughout, extremely level-headed about it. Chichikov knows how to speak and carry himself so that he will be accepted by everyone he meets. From the noble, efficient land-owner Kostanjoglo to the wild, hilarious liar Nozdryov - Chichikov mingles with and exposes us to "the whirligig of men." Gogol points out throughout the novel that the written text is inadequate to convey the actual experience - the air, the sights, the smells, the people of Russia. He tries, then, to give us "a living book" - a testament to a way of life that was soon to change. Like Melville's "Confidence-Man," which was published shortly before the American Civil War, Gogol's "Dead Souls" came out only a few years before Marx's "Communist Manifesto" which would change and determine the fate of Russia in the first decades of the 20th century. Read the lyrical "Dead Souls" - if you like his short stories, like "The Nose" or "The Overcoat," - you will find a wonderfully complex and sophisticated, and deeply involved intellect at his best.
Rating:
Summary: Another fine translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky
Review: Pevear and Volokhonsky have done it again. Another fine translation of a Russian classic. The art of the Russian novel begins with "Dead Souls," although Gogol himself likened this great work to a poema. Upon its first release, "Dead Souls" immediately won a place in the Russian heart. Chichikov and the various characters that he came in contact with in this strange journey became Russian archetypes. Unfortunately, Gogol could never bring Chichikov's adventures to a close, but this novel does not suffer for it. What makes the P&V translation stand out are the numerous reference notes, so that one can understand the many allusions that Gogol makes. P&V have masterfully rendered Gogol's protean metaphors and delightful similes, so that one can sense the poetic nature in which this novel has been written. The "demonic" plot is most intriguing but what really carries this story are the many wonderful characters that Gogol has artfully rendered, each trying to figure out why Chichikov is so interested in buying their "dead souls," deceased serfs that are still on the census and therefore subject to taxes.
Rating:
Summary: ochen xopomo
Review: Having read this novel in both Russian and English, I marvel at the brilliance of this story. The many levels of text and subtext are simply enthralling. Anyone could enjoy this story. This is a true classic.
Rating:
Summary: Chichikov: Neither too fat nor too thin.
Review: I apologize for the two spots in this review where I have replaced the original text with ###. The first part contained a reference to a web site and the other part contained excerpts from the book. The first is not allowed by amazon and the latter made the review too long to post here. You can see the full review over at my web place if you can figure out its address (again, I am not allowed to say it here).
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First things first: Was your mouth watering every time you read they were having "cabbage soup"? Not that cabbage soup is something to lust over but because Gogol can make it so. (Why, Gogol can make a vegetarian crave for a "sucking pig".) In any case, here is one of the recipes I found on the net (I liked this one the best because of the literary references):
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Now, Dead Souls: What an incredible satire on Russian character and tradition!
When I read Gogol's stories, The Madman's Diary, The Coat etc. I called him "a crazy person". I meant it as a compliment. I was referring to his creativity, his choice of odd subject matters and characters, his unique ability to reveal problems in bureaucracy with hilarious satire. I did not know that he eventually really went mad, in the more common sense that we use the term.
Dead Souls has two parts. First part is complete (and published in Gogol's time) and as good as a satiric novel can get. Second part is interrupted with many notes by the editor such as: "Part of the manuscript is missing here". What a shame!
According to an explanation on the cover of the book, the first part of Dead Souls had taken Gogol eight years to write. While writing the second part of the book, Gogol expands his vision and the goal of the book. He imagines a great book consisting of three parts in which he will get to tell the story of Russians from all walks of life.
It is interesting to note that Balzac, who was Gogol's contemporary (Balzac: 1799-1850, Gogol: 1809-1852), also envisioned a similar massive work. From Herbert J. Hunt's introduction to Balzac's "Lost Illusions":
"By about 1830 he had already conceived the idea of presenting the social and moral history of his own times in a complex series of novels and short stories: he also intended it to be an interpretation of life and society as he saw it, ..."
The only difference between Balzac's and Gogol's ambitious grand projects was that Gogol's was going to have one character (Chichikov) that would connect all the sub-stories and essentially consist of one book (of three volumes), whereas Balzac's was going to contain many independent pieces combined under the title "The Human Comedy" but could be read as individual books.
It killed them both. Balzac literally worked himself to death. Gogol, obsessed with his to-be masterpiece, `a palace of colossal dimensions', he imagined to solve Russia's problems and with his work losing its boundaries, he lost his mind, burnt most of what he had written after the publication of part one, and committed suicide.
The idea of Dead Souls was initially Pushkin's. According to what Gogol has written in his "Author's Confession", Alexander Pushkin had given his own subject to Gogol and had said that he would not have given it to anyone else. I am sure all literature lovers are grateful to Pushkin for this. Nobody else could have done justice to Chichikov and nobody else could have given us such a magnificent black humour book filled with hilarious dialogues and observations of the absurd.
I can open the book up at random, and read a hilarious scene or a dialogue, and what I read will be ridiculous but true. Gogol was a very intelligent observer. He only needed to exaggerate just slightly to get the comic effect. Take for instance the episode where Chichikov's three-horse carriage gets tangled up with a six-horse carriage. Can't you just visualize the racket that followed? Uncle Mityay and Uncle Minyay trying to untangle the harnesses with an entire village shouting and giving advise? Ridiculously funny and ridiculously real.
Towards the end of the book, Gogol leans towards solving Russia's problems by choosing villages over towns, a simple existence over an educated one, and religion over everything else. This doesn't work of course, but doesn't take away from the brilliance of the book. In the character Kostanjoglo, we see Gogol idolizing the perfect landowner and the solution to all of Russia's problems. Here, it is hard to say if Gogol is pulling the reader's leg or if he is being serious. We know that Gogol was not against serfdom, which, one can easily argue, was the root of many of Russia's problems, but if Gogol is seriously offering us Kostanjoglo's philosophies as solutions, then why does he make him as comic a character as anyone else? Does he want us to take Kostanjoglo seriously, a man who doesn't believe in any advancement, any education, any new technology, any progress?
After Kostanjoglo, comes the religious solution in the shape of Murazov. In these fragmented parts of the book, we clearly see the religious obsession that took hold over Gogol and eventually caused him to burn the rest of his manuscript. Had Gogol finished his book (or had he not burnt the manuscript), then maybe Dead Souls was not going to be as immortal (pun intended) as we accept it to be today. Gogol was capable of ruining this masterpiece with pro-serfdom, anti-progress and religious "solutions".
However, regardless of Gogol's declining sanity that is being reflected in the last bits and pieces of the book, Dead Souls remains a masterpiece and Gogol a genius. I think if he had continue to do what he does best, observe acutely and narrate hilariously, he might have indeed be capable of solving all of Russia's problems.
Here are some of Gogol's character introductions. Just look at the variety of personalities. I picked the excerpts that are either very descriptive of the character or irresistibly funny. Or both:
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Don't let the fact that this is an incomplete book stop you from reading it. Just think of it as typical Gogol, because even before going mad and burning manuscripts, Gogol had the habit of leaving his stories in the middle. One of his short stories start with a warning: "This story is missing the end." And Gogol is not kidding. When you get to the end, you find out that the end is missing.
Rating:
Summary: Russian Apotheosis
Review: Something about Russian writers seems to make them more brave, eloquent, detached - or whatever other virtue it might take - when it comes to describing the life of fantasy. Gogol's work is probably the very greatest Russian novel in at least this respect. He lays bare all of the ridiculous ways that human beings think of themselves without the self-flagellating pessimism of Dostoyevsky or the digressive sermonizing of Tolstoy. It's also a great satire, but although many of the characters are "types" few of them are two-dimensional.
It's a shame the last few sections of the novel are so piecemeal - I could cheerfully have followed Tchichikov around the country looking for dead peasants to buy for at least another volume.
Rating:
Summary: "I don't want real peasants. I want to have dead ones."
Review: Dead Souls raises the fundamental puzzling problem of literary theory: the question of an author's personal involvement in his work, meaning, of how far, Gogol's outlook on life can impinge on the lives of his protagonists (or heroes) without leading, as in Gogol's own case, to insanity and suicide. Dead Souls is a fragmented work that upon finishing the second volume of which Gogol fell under the influence of a priest who advised him to burn it. He regarded Gogol's literary work as an abomination to the eyes of God and admonished Gogol to lead a sequestered life at the monastery to atone for his sin. There Gogol suicidally took to his bed, refused all provisions and died nine days later.
The remaining manuscripts of Dead Souls are rather fragmented as the four chapters of the second volume are recalled and put together through the word of mouth. The first volume affords the whole scaffold and theme of Gogol's ambitious work. As Gogol's work on the novel proceeded, its theme took on more and more grandiose proportions in his mind. At first he wrote without forming any concrete plan in his head but the beginning of the first volume already contains hints of how Gogol hopes to fulfill his mission of saving Russia, which was looking up to him with eyes full of expectation. But quite soon the fact that the whole of Russia would appear in his novel (in fact the skein of characters the hero encounters does represent the whole of Russia, in their skepticism, greed, fear, paranoia) was no longer enough to satiate him. Gogol was getting all the more convinced of his messiah-like mission to save Russia and he began to regard Dead Souls as the means God had given him to intercede for his fellow comrades.
Brooding over the fate of mankind in general and of his countrymen in particular, Gogol was puzzled by man's perverse habit of straying from the road which lay wide open before and which, if he followed it, would lead him to some magnificent "palace fit for an emperor to live in", and of preferring instead to follow and chase after all sorts of will-o'-the-wisps to the abyss and then asking in horror what the right road was. But Gogol's own pursuit (to the truth and meaning of existence), was unfortunately, a will-o'-the-wisps which brought him to the abyss into which he finally precipitated himself. It was through the numerous characters, with whom Gogol intended to represent all of Russia, that all the stupidities and absurdities of all the "clever fellows" were caricatured and reflected and therefore became more apparent to us. The work is therefore highly satirical of the senselessness of the noisy contemporary world, and the deceitfulness of the illusions that led mankind astray.
Notwithstanding all that remains of the second volume of Dead Souls is a number of various fragments of four chapters and one fragment of what appears to be the final chapter, the plot deduced from the context is nothing but discernible. But no final judgment of the complete second volume (and maybe another volume that was utterly lost) of Dead Souls can be based on what has been crudely recovered. Simple and uneventful the plot might have been, the essence of the book simmers on the ground that injustice cannot be rooted out by punishment and that the only way of restoring the reign of justice in Russia was to appeal to the inbred sense of honor that resided in every Russia's heart.
The plot is simple. Collegiate Councilor Pavel Ivanovich Chichiknov arrived in the town N. to buy up all the peasants who died before a new census was taken for the landowners were obligated to pay taxes for these dead serfs. With a subtle resourcefulness and perspicacity, he purchased these dead serfs for resettlement in land that was distributed for free. Was he to acquire them at a considerably lower price than what the Trustee Council would give him, a great fortune would be in store for him. Under the pretext of looking for a place to settle and under all sorts of other pretexts and chicanery, he undertook to scrutinize all parts of Russia where he could buy most conveniently and cheaply the sort of peasants he wanted. He did not approach any landowner indiscriminately, but selected those with whom he could negotiate such deals with the least difficulty, trying first to make their acquaintance and gain their confidence. Conducting himself with the utmost decorum and discretion, he was extremely meticulous in find out all the leading landowners and the number of dead souls each of them owned. But the thought that the serfs were not real serfs was never absent from his mind: a pricking thought that rendered him anxious to settle the tricky business soon as possible.
But the purchase of dead souls soon became inevitably a topic of the town's general conversation, in which views and opinions were expressed regarding whether serfs should be purchased for resettlement. No one was not astounded by the news of Chichikov's purchase. Some demanded an explanation but paradoxically the affair seemed to be deprived of any proper explanation. Readers might have raised the same question: What was the meaning of these dead souls? There is no logic in dead souls. How can one buy dead souls? Others quailed at the possible outbreak of mutiny so vast a number of rowdy peasants Chichikov contrived to transport. The vague identity of Chichikov also added to the public's paranoia.
Whether Chichikov's tricky business succeed or not, Dead Souls positions itself as Gogol's judgment of mankind, being a similitude to or even an inspiration to Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Dead Souls offers a quasi-biblical solution as Gogol brings about his protagonist's spiritual regeneration: think not of dead souls, but of one's own living soul and follow a path with God's help.
2004 (47) ©MY
Rating:
Summary: Moral Rot and Mordant Wit
Review: Dead Souls is an interesting selection for several reasons. Above and beyond its commentary on the topical issues of Gogol's days (serfdom and the slow reforms thereof), sociopolitical satire, and uncommonly maladroit and unsympathetic hero, the book is an important exhibit in the evolution of the Russian language and the solidification of Russian literature. Chichikov, a Russian customs civil servant, rides his troika into N., an unnamed provincial anytown. His intentions unknown, Chichikov effortlessly wins the hearts of the seemingly superficial officials and landowners, whose hospitality and good cheer seem boundless. Chichikov, though, is courting the kind citizens with a purpose. Soon, he is traveling from house to manor, offering to buy deeds to dead peasants for reasons unknown. With Chichikov's travels through the Russian countryside, Gogol unleashes his comic insight into Russian society, especially (and unlike many of his shorter stories), rural Russia. Soon, the good hosts are exposed as guileful misers and the munificent oficials as venal and depraved. The sharpest comic exchanges come in Chichikov's haggles with the more incredulous targets - notably, a woman who preposterously suspects a hidden value in dead souls, and Sobakevich - a man bearing more than physical resemblance to a bear. At the same time, Dead Souls paints for us an unorthodox hero in Chichikov - a morally unscupulous bureaucrat whose only ambition is financial aggrandizement. Relegated to mediocrity since childhood, Chichikov pursues the crass goals set out by his dysfunctional father. Yet Chichikov is not a man, he is a state of mind - one that Gogol saw afflicting much of his beloved Russia. Through Chichikov, and with great humor, Gogol illuminates the decay of human relations and decency in a country and people he loved so dearly.
Rating: 
Summary: Interest commentary on Russian society
Review: An ambitious man in 19th century rural Russia attempts to increase his wealth and societal rank by purchasing dead peasants who, due to lengthy delays between census-takings, are still on the books. It's a brilliant premise for a Russian novel because it says so much about Russian society, both past and present. In this premise is reflected the endemic corruption of the Russian public sector. It also paints an ugly but not far from accurate picture of moral bankruptcy taken to extremes. And it portrays a prevalent truism that persists in modern-day Russia, namely that the appearance of wealth is just as important as wealth itself. For the premise alone, this novel deserves to be recognized as an important work in the annals of Russian literature. But the credit for the premise belongs not to Nikolai Gogol, but rather to Alexander Pushkin, Gogol's contemporary and Russia's poet laureate. Pushkin suggested the idea to Gogol, and Gogol enthusiastically developed it into a 400 page novel that could easily have been written in half that length. Gogol's writing is whimsical and entertaining, but it's also sloppy. Of all the 19th century Russian authors, Gogol is the one who suffered most from not having a word processor. There are structural flaws to this novel that one assumes could have easily been corrected by the author if he only had the ability to cut and paste. There are also numerous passages of the original manuscript that were lost, presumably not by fault of the author, but nonetheless frustrating to the reader. The novel is divided into two volumes, but they are seriously disjointed, and volume two fails to live up to the standard set by the promising beginning. As a social critique, this is excellent work. So excellent, in fact, that it surprises me that this book made it past the official censors in tsarist Russia. As literature, however, I'd have to give it a less enthusiastic endorsement.
Rating:
Summary: sublime, witty and entertaining
Review: Gogol is the master of imagery; in _Dead Souls_ he also shows his skills at hyperbole and satire, showing the vanity and ridiculousness of the Russian gentry in the middle of the 19th century. The plot of the story revolves around a newcomer to an unnamed Russian village (immeadiately under susupicion being an "outsider"), who manages to charm his way into the local scene as a "harmless fellow." Yet soon his plans are revealed: he wishes to purchase the "souls" of dead serfs, the better to establish himself as a member of the landed gentry. Gogol's masterpiece is almost Dickensian in its character development (and in the personalities of some of the characters), but on a deeper level comments on the superfulousness of appearance. It is a wonderful, witty and thoroughly enjoyable read. Highly recommended.
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