Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

Chi chikov, Pa vel I van ovich: echoic of birds chirping and scissors snipping, it is a flighty, frivolous-sounding name, in apparent contrast to the hero's plumpness and practicality.

Ma nil ov (no first name or patronymic): comes from manit, "to lure, to beckon." In sound it is moist-lipped, soft, and gooey.

Ko ro bochka, Na stas ya Pe tro vna: her family name means "little box."

Nozdr yov (no first name or patronymic): comes from noz-drya, "nostril," and is suggestive of all sorts of holes and porosities.

Soba ke vich, Mikha il Sem yon ovich: comes from sobaka, "dog."

Mikhail, Mikhailo, and the diminutives Misha and Mishka are common Russian names for bears. Plyu shkin, Ste pan (no patronymic): seems, on the other hand, to have no specific connotations.

Gogol plays with names in several other ways. Sometimes perfectly ordinary names become amusing when put together. So it is with Nozdryov's fellow carousers Potse lu ev (from "kiss") and Kuv shin nikov (from "jug"), as also with the dishonest clerks in volume 2—Krasno nos ov, Samo svis tov, and Kislo yed ov (Red-noser, Self-whistler, and Sour-eater). At one point in chapter 8 he mocks Russian formal address by mercilessly listing the names and patronymics of a long series of ladies and gentlemen, ending in complete absurdity with the nonexistent Makla tur a Alex an drovna.

Frequent reference is made in Dead Souls to various ranks of the imperial civil service. The following is a list of the fourteen official ranks established by Peter the Great in 1722, from highest to lowest:

1. chancellor

2. actual privy councillor

3. privy councillor

4. actual state councillor

5. state councillor

6. collegiate councillor

7. court councillor

8. collegiate assessor

9. titular councillor

10. collegiate secretary

11. secretary of naval constructions

12. government secretary

13. provincial secretary

14. collegiate registrar

The rank of titular councillor conferred personal nobility, and the rank of actual state councillor made it hereditary. Mention of an official's rank automatically indicates the amount of deference he must be shown, and by whom.

There are two words for "peasant" in Russian: krestyanin and muzhik. The first is a more neutral and specific term; the second is broader, more common, and may be used scornfully. Gogol uses both words. Since muzhik has entered English, we keep it where Gogol has it and use "peasant" where he has krestyanin.

Before their emancipation in 1861, Russian peasants were bound to the land and were the property of the landowner. The value of an estate, and thus the "worth" of its owner, was determined by the number of peasant "souls," or adult male serfs, living on it. The peasants worked the master's land and also paid him rent for their own plots, usually in kind. If they knew a trade, they could earn money practicing it and pay quitrent to the master. They remained bound to the land, however, and if they traveled to work, had to have a passport procured for them by their master. Landowners were not required to pay taxes, but their peasants were, and it was up to the landowner to collect them. He was responsible for turning in the tax money for as many souls as had been counted in the latest census. There could be a considerable lapse of time between censuses (the action of Dead Souls is set in the period between the seventh official census of 1815 and the eighth, taken in 1833). During that time a number of peasants would die, but the master remained responsible for the tax on them until they were stricken from the rolls at the next census. It was also possible for a landowner to obtain money from the government by mortgaging some or all of the peasants of whom he was the certified owner.

This translation has been made from the Russian text of the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition, volumes 6 and 7 (Leningrad, 1951). We have preferred the earlier (1855) redaction of volume 2 as being both briefer and more complete. We give the unrevised version of "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin" in chapter 10 of volume 1.

Through the gates of the inn in the provincial town of N. drove a rather handsome, smallish spring britzka, of the sort driven around in by bachelors: retired lieutenant colonels, staff captains, landowners possessed of some hundred peasant souls—in short, all those known as gentlemen of the middling sort. In the britzka sat a gentleman, not handsome, but also not bad-looking, neither too fat nor too thin; you could not have said he was old, yet neither was he all that young. His entrance caused no stir whatever in town and was accompanied by nothing special; only two Russian muzhiks standing by the door of the pot-house across from the inn made some remarks, which referred, however, more to the vehicle than to the person sitting in it. "See that?" said the one to the other, "there's a wheel for you! What do you say, would that wheel make it as far as Moscow, if it so happened, or wouldn't it?" "It would," replied the other. "But not as far as Kazan I don't suppose?" "Not as far as Kazan," replied the other. And with that the conversation ended. Then, as the britzka drove up to the inn, it met with a young man in white twill trousers, quite narrow and short, and a tailcoat with presumptions to fashion, under which could be seen a shirtfront fastened with a Tula-made pin shaped like a bronze pistol. [1] The city of Tula, some hundred miles south of Moscow, most famous for its gunsmiths—immortalized by Nikolai Leskov (1831-95) in his Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea —was also known for samovars and gingerbread. The young man turned around, looked at the carriage, held his hand to his peaked cap, which was almost blown off by the wind, and went on his way.

As the carriage drove into the yard, the gentleman was met by a tavern servant, or floorboy, as they are called in Russian taverns, lively and fidgety to such a degree that it was even impossible to tell what sort of face he had. He ran outnimbly, a napkin in his hand, all long himself and in a long half-cotton frock coat with its back almost up to his nape, tossed his hair, and nimbly led the gentleman up along the entire wooden gallery to show him his God-sent chambers. The chambers were of a familiar kind, for the inn was also of a familiar kind, that is, precisely one of those inns in provincial towns where for two roubles a day the traveler is given a comfortable room, with cockroaches peeking like prunes from every corner, and the door to the adjoining quarters always blocked by a chest of drawers, where a neighbor settles, a taciturn and quiet man, yet an extremely curious one, interested in knowing every little detail about the traveler. The external façade of the inn answered to its inside: it was very long, of two stories; the lower had not been stuccoed and was left in dark red little bricks, darkened still more by evil changes of weather, and a bit dirty anyway; the upper was painted with eternal yellow paint; below there were shops selling horse collars, ropes, and pretzels. 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.

While the visiting gentleman was examining his room, his belongings were brought in: first of all a white leather trunk, somewhat worn, indicating that this was not its first time on the road. The trunk was brought in by the coachman Selifan, a short man in a sheepskin coat, and the lackey Petrushka, a fellow of about thirty in a roomy secondhand frock coat, evidently from his master's back, a somewhat stern fellow by the look of him, with a very large nose and lips. After the trunk, a small mahogany chest inlaid with Karelian birch was brought in, a boot-tree, and a roast chicken wrapped in blue paper. When all this had been brought in, the coachman Selifan went to the stables to potter with the horses, while the lackey Petrushka began to settle himself in a small anteroom, a very dark closet, where he had already managed to drag his overcoat and with it a certain smell of his own, which had also been imparted to the sack of various lackey toiletries brought in after it. In this closet, he fixed a narrow, three-legged bed to the wall and covered it with a small semblance of a mattress, beaten down and flat as a pancake, and perhaps as greasy as a pancake, which he had managed to extort from the innkeeper.