Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls

Such programmatic readings are themselves contradicted on every page of Dead Souls, nowhere more explicitly than when the author, after describing Plyushkin's descent into worthlessness, pettiness, and vileness, suddenly cries out: "Does this resemble the truth? Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man." If "everything resembles the truth," then the laws of this resemblance are of a peculiar sort, and the reality they correspond to is incalculable. That such a will-o'-the-wisp can come so vividly to life is a tribute to the magic of Gogol's prose, with its "plunge into bottomless physicality."

His is in fact an inverted realism: the word creates the world in Dead Souls. This process is enacted, parodied, and commented upon all through the poem. One paradigm of it is the apostrophe to the "aptly uttered Russian word" at the end of chapter 5. The word in question is an unprintable epithet, which the author politely omits. It then becomes the subject of a panegyric in Gogol's best lyrical manner, which in its soaring rhetoric makes us forget that the aptly uttered word in question is not only an unprintable epithet, but in fact has not even been uttered. Another paradigm is the simile that ends the second paragraph of chapter 1: "In the corner shop, or, better, in its window, sat a seller of hot punch with a red copper samovar and a face as red as the samovar, so that from a distance one might have thought there were two samovars in the window, if one samovar had not had a pitch-black beard." This replacement of the person by the thing, of narrative reality by the figure of speech, occurs repeatedly in Dead Souls. The resulting hybrids—a bearded samovar— are essential Gogolian images. He was, in Annensky's words, "the one poet in the world who, in his ecstatic love of being—not of life, but precisely of being—was able to unite a dusty box of nails and sulphur with the golden streak in the eastern sky, and with whom a transparent and fiery maple leaf shining from its dense darkness did not dare to boast before a striped post by the roadside."

The highest instance of this love of being, revealed in the creative power of the word, is the moment in chapter 7 when Chichikov sits down in front of his chest, takes from it the lists of deceased peasants he has acquired, and draws up deeds of purchase for them. "Suddenly moved in his spirit," he says: “‘My heavens, there's so many of you crammed in here!'" He reads their names, and from the names alone begins to invent lives for them, resurrecting them one by one. Here, for the only time in the book, the author's voice joins with his hero's, as he takes the relay and continues the inventing himself. Absent presences, and presences made absent (like the five-foot sturgeon Sobakevich polishes off in chapter 8), are the materials of Gogol's poem. He plays on them in a thousand ways, in his intricate manipulation of literary conventions (as when the author profits from the fact that his hero has fallen asleep in order to tell his story), in the lying that goes on throughout the book (along with Chichikov's main business, there is also Nozdryov, who lies from a sort of natural generative force, or the "lady agreeable in all respects," who lies from inner conviction), in such details as the elaborately negated description of Italy superimposed on Russia near the start of chapter 11, or the prosecutor's bushy eyebrows ("all you had, in fact, was bushy eyebrows"—which is literally true). The tremendous paradox of the title— Dead Souls —is fraught with all the ambiguities of this inverted realism. "Everything resembles the truth." Such is Gogol's artistic procedure, the plunging into bottomless physicality of. . . the word. That is, an airy nothing.

The characters Chichikov meets are not real-life landowners, not unspoiled Russian natures or general human types; like the hero himself, they are elemental banalities. In this they are quite unlike the exuberant "souls" he resurrects from his chest. Gogol wrote in a letter of 1843:

I have been much talked about by people who have analyzed some of my aspects but failed to define my essence. Pushkin alone sensed it. He always told me that no other writer before has had this gift of presenting the banality of life so vividly, of being able to describe the banality of the banal man with such force that all the little details that escape notice flash large in everyone's eyes. That is my main quality, which belongs to me alone, and which indeed no other writer possesses.

The word translated as "banality" here is the Russian poshlost. For a full comprehension of the meaning of poshlost (pronounced "POSHlust"), readers are referred to Vladimir Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol (1944), which contains a twelve-page disquisition on the subject. Poshlost is a well-rounded, untranslatable whole made up of banality, vulgarity, and sham. It applies not only to obvious trash (verbal or animate), but also to spurious beauty, spurious importance, spurious cleverness. It is an ideal subject for Gogolian treatment, a "gape in mankind," as he calls Plyushkin, an absence he can bring to enormous presence by filling it with verbal matter. Gogol's portrayal of poshlost goes far beyond topical satire or a denunciation of social evils. His characters are not time bound; they inhabit an indefinitely expanded time in which they lose the sharply negative features of vice and wickedness and instead become wildly funny. They also have no psychology, no "inner nature." Nabokov thinks they are "bloated dead souls" themselves, and that inside "a poshlyak [a male embodiment of poshlost even of Chichikov's colossal dimensions" one can see "the worm, the little shriveled fool that lies huddled up in the depth of the posh lost-painted vacuum." But he is not quite right. There is no worm or shriveled fool inside Gogol's characters; they are all external, like landscapes. The process of "growing wild" that has happened to Plyushkin's garden has also happened to Plyushkin himself. At the end of her chapter, Korobochka almost blends back into her barnyard. Everything around Sobakevich says, "I, too, am Sobakevich." Their very lack of inner life gives Gogol's characters a monumental stature, an almost mythical dimension.

But who has ever seen mythical figures of this sort? Looking at them, we may hear ourselves repeating the question Manilov puts to Chichikov: "Here, it may be . . . something else is concealed ... ?" Yet it is all simply poshlost. But the more often Gogol repeats that everything he is describing is "all too familiar" and "the same everywhere," the more exuberant is his verbal invention. He provokes a mutation in the scale of artistic values, as Sinyavsky says, an "ostentation of language" grown out of the commonplace:

As a result, the everyday and the commonplace look somehow extraordinary in Gogol, owing already to the fact that the author, for no apparent reason, has turned his fixed attention on them. Things seem to hide or hold something in themselves, unreal in their real aspect, so wholly familiar that you cannot imagine they are just simply and causelessly standing there without signifying anything, though it is precisely their ordinary being before us and signifying nothing that constitutes their lot and their unsolved mystery.

The unsolved mystery of banality is the lining of the extraordinary behind it. It is Chichikov's chest with its double bottom, in which he stores all sorts of meaningless trash, but from which his "dead souls" also emerge in procession and move across all Russia. It is the renewal and futurity inherent in the road, which Gogol celebrates. It is the sense of promise contained in laughter itself.

Richard Pevear Translators' Note Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father's first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic. A shortened form of the patronymic is sometimes used in conversation between acquaintances; thus Platon Mikhailovich Platonov, in the second volume of Dead Souls, is most often called Platon Mikhalych. Virtually all the names Gogol uses are perfectly plausible in Russian. Some of them, however, also have specific meanings or a more general suggestiveness. (In the following list, accented syllables are given in italics.)