I just finished reading Gogol’s fantastic Dead Souls – an incomplete, but in no way less accomplished work, the structure of which Gogol is said to have constructed according to Dante’s Divine Comedy – namely, Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Along with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s one of the funniest books I’ve read and the witty sarcasm of Gogol is contained within an outrageous plot – that of purchasing dead souls. Apparently, in Russia, then, serfs could be bought or mortgaged along with the land.
The book is actually a road-trip of sorts, along the paths of which we encounter all kinds of people – the meek, the shrewd, the cunning, the violent, the helpless, the beautiful, the powerful, the saint, the pragmatic, and so on, every one of which Chichikov (our protagonist) deftly handles with immaculate skill and charm. Dead Souls is also Gogol’s tribute to Russia, but his sad comment being that the Russian culture is slowly being transgressed under the influence of German and French cultures. He acknowledges the weakness of then-Russia (1800’s), but also has hopes of its abilities to surpass every other nation in the world through the dedication and quality of its working class.
His critique is more on the corruption that is prevalent among the higher classes of its lacklustre and jejune society, and its ill-effects on the serfs. And his delightful prose with its Russian adages is simultaneously light but penetrating. Addressing the reader in a preface, Gogol asks him to annotate the book and add to it his own experiences. “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.” Here are a couple of excerpts:
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Persons of this kind – persons to whose designing nature has devoted not much thought, and in the fashioning of whose frames she has used no instruments so delicate as a file or a gimlet and so forth – are not uncommon. Such persons she merely roughhews. One cut with a hatchet, and there results a nose; another such cut with a hatchet, and there materialises a pair of lips; two thrusts with a drill, and there issues a pair of eyes. Lastly, scorning to plane down the roughness, she sends out that person into the world, saying: “Here is another live creature.”
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In time there opened out to Chichikov a still wider field, for a Commission was appointed to supervise the erection of a Government building, and, on his being nominated to that body, he proved himself one of its most active members. The Commission got to work without delay, but for a space of six years had some trouble with the building in question. Either the climate hindered operations or the materials used were of the kind which prevents official edifices from ever rising higher than the basement. But, meanwhile, other quarters of the town saw arise, for each member of the Commission, a handsome house of the non-official style of architecture. Clearly the foundation afforded by the soil of those parts was better than that where the Government building was still engaged in hanging fire!
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An excellent review of the book (and Gogol) can be found here. Particularly insightful is the observation that the condition of the landlords and the Russian landscape in the first part is similar to hell while those in the second part are akin to purgatory.
