Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

Gogol designed the tide page for the first edition of Dead Souls himself. It is an elaborate piece of not-quite-symmetrical baroque scrollwork, surrounded by airy curlicues in which various objects and figures appear. At the top center is a britzka being pulled by a galloping troika and raising a small cloud of dust. Below it to the left is a sketch of a manor house with a gate, then a well with a long sweep pointing upwards, then a tray with a bottle and four glasses the same size as the house and the well sweep. Centered under the britzka is another bottle, and to the right are more bottles (one fallen over), a glass, and a mysterious pointed object, possibly a tower. Further down around the lettering on the page we find a fish on a platter, a wooden bucket, yet another bottle, some dried fish hanging from curlicues; there is a barrel, a plaited bast shoe, a single boot, a small capering figure raising a glass, a pair of boots. A lyre hangs from the ornamentation beside a solemn satyr's mask, balanced by a similar satyr's mask on the other side and what may be more musical instruments. Above the publication date is an oval platter with a big fish on it, surrounded by smaller fish. To the left of the date a balalaika and a guitar, to the right of it a miniature dancing couple. At the very bottom center, amid more scrollwork, is a human face. The curlicues around the words Dead Souls turn out, on closer inspection, to be skulls.

The words on the title page are presented in lettering of different styles and very unequal sizes. At the top, in the smallest and plainest letters, we read Chichikov's Adventures; then, in very small cursive, the word or; then, in larger and bolder letters, Dead Souls. In the largest letters of all, in the very center of the page, white against a black background, is the word Poema, the Russian term for a narrative poem. Below that, in small but elegantly ornate lettering, appears the name of the author: N. Gogol. And finally, on a square plaque under the oval platter with the big fish, comes the date of publication: 1842.

This was Gogol's own introduction to his book. The sketches suggest something of its content and more of its atmosphere: the road, the racing britzka, country estates, a good deal of drinking and eating, music and dancing, and, in the midst of it all, those little skulls, those slightly menacing satyrs, that ambiguous human face looking out at us. These are all the stuff of Gogol's poema. But before considering the nature of this paradoxical feast, I want to say something about the words Gogol distinguished so carefully by the size of their lettering and their placement on the page.

Gogol was thirty-three in 1842, when this first edition of the first volume of Dead Souls was published. A second edition came out in 1846, but the promised continuation of Chichikov's adventures, the "two big parts to come" mentioned at the end of the first volume, were never finished. Gogol labored over the second part for the last ten years of his life, burned one version in 1845, and another in 1852, a week before his death. What survived among his papers were drafts of the first four chapters, fragmentary themselves, plus part of a later chapter, possibly the last. They were published in 1855, in a volume entitled The Works of Nikolai Vassilyevich Gogol Found After His Death. The first volume of Dead Souls was, in fact, the last good book Gogol wrote.

N. Gogol, as he modestly styled himself, was in 1842 the brightest name in Russian literature. Vissarion Belinsky, a leading radical and the most influential critic of the time, had hailed him in 1835 as a writer who might finally create a truly Russian literature, independent of foreign models. He saw that promise fulfilled in Dead Souls, a new step for Gogol, as he wrote in an article of 1842, "by which he became a Russian national poet in the full sense of the word." But the conservative Slavophils also claimed him as their own, perhaps with more reason. This all sounds lofty and serious, yet the central figure in Gogol's work is laughter. It was laughter that gave such brightness to Gogol's name, that pure laughter which reached its fullest expression in his play Revizor (The inspector, or Government inspector, or Inspector-general), written in 1835 and first staged on April 19, 1836, at the command and in the presence of the emperor Nikolai I. The play was a tremendous success. Gogol literally set all Russia laughing. The emperor insisted that his ministers see it. "Everyone took it as aimed at himself, I first of all," he is supposed to have said. There are stories of actors laughing as they performed the play, because the audience facing them seemed to be performing it even better themselves. "Revizor is the high point of laughter in Gogol's work," Andrei Sinyavsky wrote. "Never either before or after Revizor have we laughed like that!" As the "we" implies, such laughter unites people through time as well as across footlights. (Sinyavsky's book V teni Gogolya (In Gogol's shadow) was published in 1975 under the pseudonym of Abram Tertz. It has yet to be translated into English.)

The idea for Revizor came from Alexander Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, who, as Gogol once observed, also "liked to laugh." Pushkin had been one of the first to recognize Gogol's talent, and published some of his writings, including the famous story The Nose, in his magazine The Contemporary. Shortly before giving him the idea for Revizor, according to Gogol's own testimony, Pushkin gave him the subject of Dead Souls, "his own subject, which he wanted to make into a poem." Gogol set to work at once. The first mention of the book in his correspondence is in a letter to Pushkin dated October 7, 1835: "I have begun to write Dead Souls. The plot has stretched into a very long novel, and it will, I think, be extremely amusing ... I want to show all Russia—at least from one side—in this novel." In the same letter, he asked Pushkin to give him "some plot... a purely Russian anecdote," to which Pushkin responded with a story that had actually happened to him two years earlier. While stopping in the town of Nizhni Novgorod in September 1833, he dined once or twice with the governor and his wife. The governor for some reason suspected him of being a revizor, an inspector traveling incognito for the emperor, and sent a letter to Orenburg warning the governor there of Pushkin's coming and informing him of his suspicions. The governor of Orenburg happened to be an old friend of Pushkin's, and he laughingly told him about it. In Revizor, Gogol's hero capitalizes on the error throughout the play.

There is no question about the source of the idea for Revizor. But for Dead Souls Pushkin has a rival much closer to home, and even in Gogol's own family. A distant relation of his, Maria Grigorievna Anisimo-Yanovskaya, left the following reminiscence:

The thought of writing Dead Souls was taken by Gogol from my uncle Pivinsky. Pivinsky had a small estate, some thirty peasant souls [that is, adult male serfs], and five children. Life could not be rich, and so the Pivinskys lived by distilling vodka. Many landowners at that time had distilleries, there were no licenses. Suddenly officials started going around gathering information about everyone who had a distillery. The rumor spread that anyone with less than fifty souls had no right to distill vodka. The small landowners fell to thinking; without distilleries they might as well die. But Kharlampy Petrovich Pivinsky slapped himself on the forehead and said: "Aha! Never thought of it before!" He went to Poltava and paid the quitrent for his dead peasants as if they were alive. And since even with the dead ones he was still far short of fifty, he filled his britzka with vodka, went around to his neighbors, exchanged the vodka for their dead souls, wrote them down in his own name, and, having become the owner of fifty souls on paper, went on distilling vodka till his dying day, and so he gave the subject to Gogol, who used to visit Fedunky, Pivinsky's estate, which was about ten miles from Yanovshchina [the Gogol estate]; anyway, the whole Mirgorod district knew about Pivinsky's dead souls.