Nikolai Gogol: 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 beginnings of a formal description of Dead Souls: a dynamic form, involving characters not necessarily bound up with the hero's fate, who can be introduced (and dropped) at any point, and allowing the author great freedom of movement in time, place, and action. In his guidebook, Gogol introduced his concept of such a form, midway between the novel and the epic, calling it "minor epic." His examples are Don Quixote and Orlando Furioso. While the epic hero is always an important and conspicuous public figure, the hero of a minor epic can be private and socially insignificant. The author leads him through a series of adventures and changes intended at the same time to present a living picture of the age, a chart of its uses and abuses, and "a full range of remarkable human phenomena." Indeed, Gogol plunges so much in médias res that we learn nothing about his hero's life until the last chapter of volume 1. Figures and events emerge the way the "dead souls" emerge from Chichikov's chest in the seventh chapter, not part of any plot, but indispensable to the poem. So, too, the theme of Russia ("Rus!") does not derive from situation or character, but is added lyrically by the author, forming part of the poetical ambience of the book, as do the many epic or mock epic similes, the asides, the lyrical flights and apostrophes. To portray "all Russia," Gogol needed this freedom of the road, of movement in several senses, allowing him to include a diversity of images, to multiply views metaphorically, because the road is also the writing itself, the "scrawling" of landscapes along the racing britzka's way. All this is what is promised by the word poema.

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 inner state of his soul might be compared with a demolished building, which has been demolished so that from it a new one could be built; but the new one has not been started yet, because the definitive plan has not yet come from the architect and the workers are left in perplexity." Amid the rubble and perplexity of the second volume, the unsinkable squire Petukh, met by chance when Chichikov takes a wrong road, sounds the last great cockcrow of Gogol's genius.

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 Innokenty Annensky, in his essay "The Aesthetics of Dead Souls and Its Legacy" (1909), asked: "What would have become of our literature if he alone for all of us had not taken up this burden and this torment and plunged in bottomless physicality our still so timid, now reasonable, now mincing, even if luminously aerial, Pushkinian word?" (Annensky's italics.) The phrase "plunged in bottomless physicality" nicely evokes both the material exuberance of Gogol's style and its artistic procedure.

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 funny; it lays bare the nonsense and triviality of Russian life, implicitly asking how all this could become so important, and in this it is both profound and serious.

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.