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Suflete moarte

Nikolai Gogol

3.98 · Rating details · 75,369 ratings · 3,193 reviews

The first of the great Russian novels and one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature, Dead Souls is the tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con man who causes consternation in a small Russian town when he shows up out of nowhere proposing to buy title to serfs who, though dead as doornails, are still property on paper. What can he have up his sleeve, the lo ...more

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Paperback, 398 pages

Published 1987 by Editura Univers (first published 1842)

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Jun 15, 2019 Jim Fonseca rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: russian-authors

The book goes way back to 1842, before Russian serfs were emancipated in 1861. It’s considered a picaresque novel; Don Quixote-ish – a journey with a lot of satire and absurd situations with a rascal as a main character, a man who always has a get-rich-quick scheme going. He’s kind of happy-go-lucky - a drinker, gambler, liar. There are more than 2,000 reviews on GR so I’ll be brief.

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In this story the main character is buying “dead souls” – papers from other property owners whose serfs died (own ...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, russia, historical, novels, fiction, 19th-century

Мёртвые ду́ши = Myórtvyjye dúshi = Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature.

The purpose of the novel was to demonstrate the flaws and faults of the Russian mentality and character. Gogol portrayed those defects through Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters in his endeavors. These people are typical of the Russian middle-class of the time.

Gogol himself saw ...more

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Aug 07, 2019 Jeffrey Keeten rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: the-russians

”What was the riddle, indeed, what was the riddle of the dead souls? There was no logic whatsoever in dead souls. Why buy dead souls? Where would such a fool be found? What worn-out money would one pay for them? To what end, to what business, could these dead souls be tacked? And why was the governor’s daughter mixed up in it? If he wanted to carry her off, why buy dead souls for that? And if he was buying dead souls, why carry off the governor’s daughter? Did he want to make her a gift of these ...more

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Mar 14, 2010 Stephen rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, literature, humor-and-satire, audiobook, classics-asian, easton-press, 1800s

2.0 stars. As much as I hate to say this about a book that is both a classic of Russian literature and considered one of the best satires ever written, THIS BOOK BORED ME TO DEATH!!! Okay, not quite "coffin ready" dead, but certainly bored to the point of suffering intermittent bouts of narcolepsy. I can certainly say without hyperbole that this is not a book I would recommend as an “enjoyable” experience, no matter how much Vodka you have standing by.

My assessment of the book arises DESPITE the 2.0 stars. As much as I hate to say this about a book that is both a classic of Russian literature and considered one of the best satires ever written, THIS BOOK BORED ME TO DEATH!!! Okay, not quite "coffin ready" dead, but certainly bored to the point of suffering intermittent bouts of narcolepsy. I can certainly say without hyperbole that this is not a book I would recommend as an “enjoyable” experience, no matter how much Vodka you have standing by.

My assessment of the book arises DESPITE the fact that the novel is very well written and gives an excellent description of “old” Russia (cold, dreary and depressing but otherwise a great place to visit). The historical detail is both precise and very broad as Gogol includes in the narrative detailed discussions of many aspects of Russian life from the economy to social life to politics to the very unique mindset of the Russian people. Thus, as a historical overview of a not very well known period of Russian history the novel is very good.

In addition, the basic plot itself (or at least the idea of the plot) was very interesting. The “dead souls” of the title refers to the measuring unit (i.e., souls) used by the Russian census takers to count the numbers of serfs that landowners owned. Serfs, while not exactly the same as slaves, are similar enough for purposes of this review as they were considered property and had very few rights. The taxes that Russian landowners paid during this time were based on the number of serfs they owned. Anyway, the main character of the novel, Pavel Ivanovitch Chichikov, devises a plan to “purchase” from various landowners those serfs who have died since the last census but are still listed as alive for purposes of the taxes paid (at least until the next census which is only done every 5 to 10 years). Why he wants to do this, I will not spoil but it is very clever and I thought an excellent basis for a good story.

So we have a book that is very well written, full of superb historical detail and an original and potentially interesting plot. So what was the problem? Well, first off...NO VODKA!! No, in all seriousness, I found the book to be simply way too dull and plodding. The satirical elements were UNDERWHELMING (and that is being kind) and the story was just incredibly slow to unfold. I kept trying to give this the benefit of the doubt, it is a classic after all, but it was just determined to remian not very interesting or enjoyable. The various characters Chichikov encounters were intended to portray various types of Russians and I guess I was not familiar enough with the period to understand the nuances (and thus the intended caricature) that Gogal was trying to highlight. Therefore, the various encounters just sort of bled into one another and left me anxious for the end.

In sum, this was a book that I could appreciate on many levels (the quality of the writing, the historical detail, the cleverness of the plot) and there were certainly moments of the story that I truly liked. However, at the end of the day, from the standpoint of my enjoyment of the novel as literature, I can not rate it higher than two stars. ...more

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Aug 19, 2016 Jon Nakapalau rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, favorites

Another 'classic bucket list' book. As he buys dead souls in an attempt to help increase his social standing Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov represents the all too common association that is made between power, ethics and the law. The dead on the list are treated (by the law) better than they ever were when they were living. Should be required reading to get an MBA. ...more

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Aug 29, 2020 Piyangie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: russian-lit, my-library

Dead Souls is a work of pure satire. There is no section of Russian society that this work doesn't touch. It scorns the Russian bureaucracy, gentry, and society at large. Many of Gogol's works are known for their satire, but I think none would equal this.

Using a simple story with an antihero, Gogol exposes the corruption, bribery, and despotism of the Russian officials. A major part of the story is devoted to this exercise. Gogol brings to light how a "government" within the government operates Dead Souls is a work of pure satire. There is no section of Russian society that this work doesn't touch. It scorns the Russian bureaucracy, gentry, and society at large. Many of Gogol's works are known for their satire, but I think none would equal this.

Using a simple story with an antihero, Gogol exposes the corruption, bribery, and despotism of the Russian officials. A major part of the story is devoted to this exercise. Gogol brings to light how a "government" within the government operates hindering the established laws and regulations of the land. He shows how this "government' within the government corrupts the whole system of governing to the social and economic detriment of Russia. Gogol's pen doesn't rest there. It extends to the gentry as well. He shows how the idleness, mismanagement, and greed of the landowners have considerably contributed to the poor living conditions of the peasants and the surfs. Gogol goes even further. He wields his pen against society, in general, to show how the dominating prejudice and vanity have helped to cultivate an ignorant and uncultured populace.

Gogol's message is very strong. He sees that with the present state affairs, Russia cannot progress further. He doesn't hesitate to point out the issues boldly so that people would begin to think that a change is necessary if they are to secure a better future for the generations to come. With a story bordering between reality and absurdity, this is the message that Gogol wants to convey through his Dead Souls.

But even though the message is powerful, Gogol wouldn't have accomplished much had it not been for his writing. Gogol called Dead Souls an epic poem in verse. True to his description the poetic beauty, the adventure, and even the absurdity are interlaced to produce a light but clever and super satirical work. While the message holds your attention the writing absorbs you in it. I've read some of his works before but never was I captivated more. It is not a light and interesting story as such, the content is quite bleak, but I had such fun reading it which says a lot about his writing.

This is not a complete work, so my review is mostly formulated on the completed first part, but I don't think there would be any lesser understanding or enjoyment of the book because it is incomplete. For me, this work is the best of Gogol, where he truly comes out as one of the most remarkable Russian authors. ...more

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Jul 03, 2020 Luís rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ukraine, e-5-favourites, g-classics

Every writer carries an essential book, the work he has to "tell everything". From the day he saw it, when he began to realize it, to think of himself, his vision of the world and the conception of his own life revolve around this pole; the work becomes the symbol of man, his message.
It's about a crook, Pavel Ivanovich Tchitchikov. The latter has an extraordinary idea to make a fortune: he will redeem dead souls.
In ancient Russia, the peasants (dead souls, as they called them) were considered se ...more

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Jan 04, 2019 Fionnuala added it · review of another edition

Shelves: gogol, review-in-diary-form

Dead Souls Reading Diary

January 4th, 2019
I've just reached page 249 where finally the hero, to the waving of the cap of the houseman, who was standing there in the same fustian frock-coat, and in the presence of the inn-servants and someone else’s lackeys and coachmen, who had gathered to gape at the departure of someone else’s master, and amid all the other circumstances that accompany a departure, took his seat in the vehicle, and the britska, which was of the sort in which bachelors ride, and ...more

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Sep 15, 2011 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aere-perennius, 2012

An absurd and brilliant satire. To think I avoided reading this novel for years because I thought it was going to be depressing. Ha! Dead Souls reminded me in many ways of the Odyssey + Don Quixote written by Mark Twain in a Russian prose poem. Gogol captures the absurdity of the mid-19th century Russia. Included in Gogol's satire/farce is an absurd and brilliant look at the corruption of the government, the stratification of society, the pretentiousness of the Russian middle-class, etc. Anyway, ...more

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Aug 18, 2011 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: For those who've enjoyed Gogol's short stories

Shelves: read-in-translation, 19th-century, novel, russia-and-soviet-union

What is this book?

I can't remember any more if Gogol described it as a Poem or an Epic, maybe it doesn't matter what he called it since he had great chunks of the manuscript fed into the fire on the advice of his religious advisor.

So we are left with part one, some bits of part two and an outline of the three part whole of the work, the rest having gone up in smoke.

What there is of the first part is generally read as a comedy. It is funny, but bear in mind that the first part is about a young ma ...more

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Jan 09, 2022 J.L. Sutton rated it really liked it · review of another edition

“However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.”

Publication of Dead Souls with illustrations and autograph by Chagall put on auction

Publication of Dead Souls with illustrations and autograph by Chagall put on auction

Ostensibly a story about a man traveling the Russian countryside inexplicably buying the souls of dead serfs, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls is part commentary on middle class morality, part picaresque account of the main character's travels and part satire. It is actually a fun read and the humor comes here and there in moments when characters recognize the absurdity of what is happening. Dead Souls had ...more

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Jun 25, 2014 Lisa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die

What did you think, Goodreads politely asks me.

Well, dear Goodreads, it has been a while since I read Dead Souls, and I think I remember the melancholy humour best, but as for what I THINK, this is what keeps haunting my mind:

There are so many things going on in the world right now that are more bizarre than wandering around buying dead serfs' names from their owners in order to make a profit...

Sometimes I think of Dead Souls when I read the news and wonder whether our world of 2019, with all t ...more

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Dec 28, 2007 Vanja Antonijevic rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Gogol's "Dead Souls" is a true masterpiece. It is the only Russian novel that I have read that brings me as much deep satisfaction as Dostoevsky’s great novels. The novel is satirical, intellectual, political, and also entertaining.

The intriguing plot is sketched as follows:

A somewhat mysterious middle class man, named Chichikov, comes to a town and attempts to build prestige by impressing minor officials of the place. The man spends beyond his means in order to impress, and tries to befriend t ...more

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Jan 18, 2020 Praveen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

"The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes."
— Nikolai Gogol

Before saying anything else, I think I must begin with my association with this novel. It was that period of my age, years and years ago when I had read only a few books, most of them incomplete, yet I used to impress my friends with that precocious intelligence I gathered from those books devoured by me in such scanty doses.
And what about my knowledge of Russian literature then?... That was extraordi ...more

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Nov 03, 2014 Maru Kun rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 19th-century-lit, c-russia, review-or-reviewed

The hero of Dead Souls, Chichikov, these days would be Fabulous Chichikov.

Sitting at his 40th floor, 200 West Street dealing desk Fabulous Chichikov’s eye would travel from screen to screen searching out deals in NINJA loans, distressed debt and CDOs squared. Debits and credits would flit in and out of his trading book as ephemeral as any Dead Soul.

Instead of a “troika suitable for bachelors”, Fabulous Chichikov would travel by Uber limousine. He would move from Manhattan steakhouse to members o The hero of Dead Souls, Chichikov, these days would be Fabulous Chichikov.

Sitting at his 40th floor, 200 West Street dealing desk Fabulous Chichikov’s eye would travel from screen to screen searching out deals in NINJA loans, distressed debt and CDOs squared. Debits and credits would flit in and out of his trading book as ephemeral as any Dead Soul.

Instead of a “troika suitable for bachelors”, Fabulous Chichikov would travel by Uber limousine. He would move from Manhattan steakhouse to members only night-club to hotel suite where he would “execute transactions” with “counterparties”, each deal bigger and more grotesque than the last.

Mexican immigrants working in hundred degree restaurant kitchens would prepare Fabulous Chichikov Michelin-starred molecular gastronomy while bartending Humanities MAs mix his Negronis. But these attendants to Fabulous Chichikov’s whims are as irrelevant to this story as any of Gogol’s muzhiks to the original Chichikov.

Sobakevich is the subtle hedge fund manager, promising his regulator that every loan he sold to Fabulous Chichikov was good. Manilov is inherited wealth, inviting Fabulous Chichikov to his Upper East side apartment to dine with his trophy wife. The Widow Korobochka is the dim-witted insurance company executive, unsure whether or not to buy into one of Fabulous Chichikov’s deals. Nozdrev is the the coked-out dealer looking for his last big trade.

But the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is on our hero’s tail. A new administration is asking questions. Senators are meeting with their lawyers.

Fabulous Chichikov e-mails his girlfriend: “As more and more leverage enters the system the whole building is about to collapse! The only potential survivor is the Fabulous Chichikov, standing in the middle of all the complex highly leveraged exotic trades I created without necessarily understanding all of the implications...”.

It’s time for our hero to take a limousine to Teterboro airport. He can board his private jet (all Americans who can afford one love to ride in private jets) and slumber at thirty thousand feet, dreaming the great American Dream. ...more

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Jun 08, 2018 Daniela rated it really liked it · review of another edition

4.5*

In Dead Souls, a novel about Russia and what it means to be Russian, we follow the adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, literature's most endearingly dishonest character. After several attempts to grow rich and live a life of comfort, Chichikov comes up with a scheme of buying non-existent peasants in order to get a state loan on them and, thus, making easy money out of nothing. The non-existent peasants are the title’s Dead Souls . They were those serfs who had already died but were cou ...more

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Apr 14, 2014 Richard Derus rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Dead Souls is eloquent on some occasions, lyrical on others, and pious and reverent elsewhere. Nikolai Gogol was a master of the spoof. The American students of today are not the only readers who have been confused by him. Russian literary history records more divergent interpretations of Gogol than perhaps of any other classic.

In a new translation of the comic classic of Russian literature, Chichikov, an enigmatic stranger and schemer, buys deceased serfs' Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Dead Souls is eloquent on some occasions, lyrical on others, and pious and reverent elsewhere. Nikolai Gogol was a master of the spoof. The American students of today are not the only readers who have been confused by him. Russian literary history records more divergent interpretations of Gogol than perhaps of any other classic.

In a new translation of the comic classic of Russian literature, Chichikov, an enigmatic stranger and schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from their landlords' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit and to reinvent himself as a gentleman.

My Review: No one seems to have pinned this work down as of yet. 172 years on, Gogol still eludes the butterfly net of scholarship. No one seems to argue that the book is not wryly amusing. That seems not to be enough, for some reason, to the literati.

Is it a satire? Hell, who cares!

“You can't imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays. The things these scribblers write!"
--and--
“However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.”
--and--
“But wise is the man who disdains no character, but with searching glance explores him to the root and cause of all.”

Satire? Maybe. Funny and snarky and ironic? Oh yes. I've read that some scholars compare the, to be kind, circularity of the plot to The Odyssey. Ummm, okay. Some offer Christian subtexts to the idea of buying and selling souls as a commentary on the...yech, whatever, the book is a fun and funny way to wile away a few hours.

Gogol himself considered this a prose poem, and I suspect he called it that so he'd be free of the shackles of novelistic convention. Let him loose, don't lard in your expectations of what a text must or must not do, and smile:

“The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.”

Yes, lawd, you sing it Brother Nikolai! ...more

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Dec 20, 2013 Alan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I have read only fifty pages of Gogol in Russian, enough to know how hilarious he is, and to regret his conversion and attempt to destroy this great book.
"Sobakavich" alone rewards the reader with the Russian patronymic, "Son of" applied to "Sobaka," a bitch. Yet Sobakavich is the most genial of men, who refuses to sell even those of his employ who have died. His sentimental valuing of the mere memory of his dead worker is a triumph over materialism. Lovely stuff. Viva Gogol! Sobakievich is eve I have read only fifty pages of Gogol in Russian, enough to know how hilarious he is, and to regret his conversion and attempt to destroy this great book.
"Sobakavich" alone rewards the reader with the Russian patronymic, "Son of" applied to "Sobaka," a bitch. Yet Sobakavich is the most genial of men, who refuses to sell even those of his employ who have died. His sentimental valuing of the mere memory of his dead worker is a triumph over materialism. Lovely stuff. Viva Gogol! Sobakievich is even more relevant today where tax evasion by the 1% is an industry supporting accountants and lawyers, supposed "business" experts who are really experts at short-changing the public.
And American tax laws may now surpass those of 19th C Czarist Russia--in the loopholes provided for the rich--though in fact the loophole Chichikov exploits has not reemerged.
Here it is: In Czarist Russia, wealth was not calculated by land. Anyone might own tens of thousands of hectares, or hundreds of square versts. You were not rich enough to marry unless you possessed the workers to till the land, the мужик. Of course, you owned them, but also, they had a right to till the land--not exactly like American slavery. Chichikov discovers a loophole in the tax law, so he plans to amass souls for his land, in order to marry well. The big house. The BMW, the коляска, the fancy carriage.

Back when I was reading Russian under the tutelage of a Bolshoi violinist, I decided to purchase Gogol for my shelves, and drove the hour and a half to Harvard Square, to Shoenhof's Books. They had no Мертвые души, but they had a later work, hardbound in green. I vaguely knew Gogol had repented his best writing, but I didn't think of the implication. A later work...hmmm. When I got home and started reading it, it turned out to be a kind of spiritual autobiography, the title roughly, Meditations on the Divine Legacy. I do not object to religion, though I think the 28,000 years light takes to arrive from the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy a humbling even of, say, Judaism's 5,000 year, and certainly Christianity's 2,000. I do not object, I just prefer not to read such personal submersion. Give me Rousseau, or Gogol before his conversion.
In brief, we have outgrown Gogol on tax evasion and on slavery--NOT. I have always told my classes about Chaucer's attitude toward the alchemist who briefly joins the pilgrims, before he is "outed" as a fraud.
Here 'tis: Mankind is not bright enough to muck around with chemistry and atoms. Why, we might blow ourselves up! I would add, Of course, Chaucer was Wrong--NOT.
Now nobody reads Gogol's conversion rhetoric, but they read his great lit, IF they learn "Dead Souls" is a comedy, the worst-titled comedy. Viva Gogol! Viva lit! ...more

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Nov 10, 2016 Alex rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Russians who own gold chains

Shelves: 2016

Here's a Russian douchebag.

This is called poshlust, an untranslatable word referring to a kind of banal tackiness special to Russia. Here's another Russian douchebag:

The stereotype goes all the way back to 1842 and Gogol's great antihero dandy grifter Chichikov, with his Navarino smoke-and-flame silk frock coat and his violet-scented snuffbox, and according to Nabokov poshlust is the great theme of this book, a definition of an essential theme of Russian character.

Chichikov

That's not what Gogol ...more

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Jan 29, 2019 Michael Perkins rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

the wonderful dark irony of Russian humor....

According to the story line, a trickster, "not too fat and not too thin," i.e. a rather average person named Chichikov, is trying to enroll the names of dead peasants (muzhiks) to increase his paper wealth and raise his stature. These are the nominal dead souls.

Chichikov knows that serfs have value, even if it's just on paper. Most landowners jump at Chichikov's offer to buy them, because it means the landowners will no longer have to pay taxes on se ...more

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Nov 28, 2019 Antonomasia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: divine-comedy-booklovers, 1001-books, russia, 2019, 19th-century, guardian-1000, ukraine

5 stars for the B.G. Guerney translation (revised version), Yale UP.
I also read Part II in Donald Rayfield's translation (NYRB Classics / Alma Classics).

'Exuberant', 'panoramic' and 'state of the nation' are attributes that come up time and again among my favourite novels, so it's hardly surprising I liked this. Dead Souls, in the Guerney translation, is also one of the funniest 19th century novels I've read. Diary of a Nobody was the funniest; I wasn't as keen on Three Men in a Boat as some peo ...more

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Sep 20, 2020 Chrissie rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audible-uk, hf, 2020-read, classics, russia, humor

Honestly, I like this book, but not a whole lot, so I have settled on three rather than four stars.

I like the satirical humor—it isn’t nasty, it makes you laugh.

The prose doesn’t feel dated; it’s easy to follow. Constance Garnett is the translator.

I like very much the descriptions of people and places—the writing is lyrical in parts. Reading this, you get a strong sense of time and place—provincial Russia in the first half of the 19th century. The emancipation of the serfs had yet to take place; Honestly, I like this book, but not a whole lot, so I have settled on three rather than four stars.

I like the satirical humor—it isn’t nasty, it makes you laugh.

The prose doesn’t feel dated; it’s easy to follow. Constance Garnett is the translator.

I like very much the descriptions of people and places—the writing is lyrical in parts. Reading this, you get a strong sense of time and place—provincial Russia in the first half of the 19th century. The emancipation of the serfs had yet to take place; the emancipation reform began in 1861. Prior to this, serfs were landowners’ property—they could be bought, sold, even mortgaged. The purchase and then mortgaging of serfs is what the central character is up to in this tale. Serfs who had died, still registered in the last census, are what he buys. When he buys them, previous owners need no long pay taxes for them and so he is hoping to get them really cheap or for nothing. With these dead serfs in his possession he can get money by mortgaging them at a bank. We observe how the landowners / serf owners behave. Some, cognizant of the demand for the serfs, set a high price on them. The eponymous “dead souls” has two meanings—the dead serfs and the dead souls of egotistical, selfish, avaricious landowners. The book is a criticism of the Russian middleclass.

The large number of characters and the Russian names gave me some trouble. I mixed up characters now and then. I think it is harder to listen to this than to read it. You don’t pick the book up for character portrayal. Characters are as silhouettes: they represent different types of people. I do like that the central character is not drawn as a shining hero.

The book reads as a string of episodes, which makes it disjointed. It is debated if it was fully completed. Sections of the manuscript are missing, and the ending is abrupt, in fact it stops in the middle of a sentence.

I am definitely glad to have read this. It is a classic not to be missed. The descriptive writing is better than good. The humor is topnotch. I like very much that the message conveyed is delivered through humor rather than by means of a dry, didactic sermon. On the minus side, the plot doesn’t hold together properly, goes off in different directions and should have been tightened.

Nicholas Boulton narrates wonderfully. The narration is clear and read at a good speed. He uses different intonations for different characters, and he does this well, without excessive exaggeration. His pronunciation of a character’s name is not varied, this does help one recognize them. That two characters have similarly sounding names is what gave me the most trouble. This is not the narrator’s fault! Five stars for the audio narration. ...more

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Sep 01, 2018 Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: satire, russia-ukraine, classic-fiction

Way ahead of its time, Dead Souls turned out to be everything I'd hoped, but still caught me a little by surprise as to just how funny it actually turned out to be. Blending realism and the picaresque, I read this when I went through a bit of an obsession for Russian literature. One could even argue Russian literature is the best literature, at least the older stuff anyway. The anti-hero Chichikov was a most memorable character, who simply travels around the Russian countryside buying up the dea ...more

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Jul 20, 2014 Max rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: russian

An entertaining satire published in 1842 but with flippant style that seems much more modern. Bureaucratic inept government and pompous neurotic gentry get scathing treatment. For example after a huge dinner at a noble’s estate, “…the master of the house had settled himself into his…armchair that would have held four, he dropped asleep. His corpulent person was transformed into a blacksmith’s bellows; from his open mouth and from his nose he began to emit sounds as are not found in even the newe ...more

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Apr 19, 2018 Srividya Vijapure rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, kindle-owned, russian-lit, russia, literature, favourites, 2018-challenge, satire, world-lit-2018

The weather was hot and humid and conducive for only one thing, sleeping. I had finished Dostoevksy’s The House of the Dead and was looking forward to relaxing and thinking about how to write a review for that book. However, the pull towards another Russian, a Russian that D admired and a book and its characters that D referred to consistently in his book was just too much of a temptation to me. I had to read the book and understand why D, one of my favourite authors, felt so moved and inspired ...more

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Dec 13, 2019 Gabrielle rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2019, reviewed, classics, russian-soviet, own-a-copy

3 and a half stars, maybe it'll be rounded up, I have to think about it.

“Dead Souls” has a complicated reputation as a very important classic, but also as a potentially frustrating unfinished work. A certain understanding of the context in which Gogol wrote it is crucial to grasp the dark humour of the plot – not to mention the commentary Gogol was making on his society.

Chichikov is, for all intents and purposes, a con-man: as he lives in a society ruled by corrupt officials, he doesn’t really t 3 and a half stars, maybe it'll be rounded up, I have to think about it.

“Dead Souls” has a complicated reputation as a very important classic, but also as a potentially frustrating unfinished work. A certain understanding of the context in which Gogol wrote it is crucial to grasp the dark humour of the plot – not to mention the commentary Gogol was making on his society.

Chichikov is, for all intents and purposes, a con-man: as he lives in a society ruled by corrupt officials, he doesn’t really think his moral conduct is all that reprehensible, and if anything, considers those who condemn him to be hypocrites who exploit others for their own gain just as much as he does, albeit, from behind a veil of legitimacy and lawfulness. As we follow him on his sordid quests to purchase the titular “dead souls”, we encounter all manners of characters that show the reader the crumbling of Russian society, as the ripples of the failed French Invasion continue to be felt across all social strata. Eventually and inevitably, his bad deeds catch up with him, but since the novel is unfinished, we don't really know what fate awaits him.

In tone, this book is much closer to “The Master and Margarita” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) than to “War & Peace” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), despite taking place in a time much closer to Tolstoy’s story than to Bulgakov’s (who, it must be noted, adapted “Dead Souls” for the stage in the 30s). But I'm afraid I kept waiting for it to get as good as either: perhaps it's incompleteness is to blame, but I finished the book feeling frustrated. The writing was often quite beautiful, and the characters vividly described - I supposed I simply would have liked to know how their stories ended. Does Chichikov get away with his madcap plan? Does he give up the scams and decides to go legit? I understand that closure is not necessarily the point of a good story, but "Dead Souls" was clearly meant to have an ending...

It's an interesting experience, too, reading a surrealist and existential novel like this one when the world we currently live in has reached levels of surrealism and existentialism that most people probably didn’t expect to experience in their lifetimes. My sense of humour, which has admittedly always been rather dark and morbid, has not gotten much lighter, and I admit that laughing at the madness is sometimes the only way not to fall head first into it which makes Gogol’s absurd and picaresque story almost hysterical at times.

So in the end, as I can't quite decide how I feel about it, but think it will merit a re-read in the future, I leave it at 3 undecided stars... ...more

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Dec 22, 2019 Roy Lotz rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: russophilia, novels-novellas-short-stories

There are, of course, many faces in the world over the finish of which nature has taken no great pains

For a book with such a gloomy title, this is quite a fun read. Gogol took the genre of the picaresque novel—born in Spain, and widely popular in England—and applied it to the Russia of the early 1800s. The result is a brilliant satire of his place and time. Our hero, Chichikov, rides around provincial Russia trying to buy up the deeds for dead peasants. This is a get-rich-quick scheme based on the absurdities of the Russia bureaucracy: namely, that all serfs (even dead ones) were counted as living until the next census was taken. (The idea is to use the serfs as leverage for a loan.)

This serves as the perfect vehicle to push the middle-aged Chichikov—clever, strong-willed, but ultimately vain and petty—into contact with all sorts of provincial characters. Gogol shows his greatest talent in drawing this gallery of people, each of them representative of a archetype, and yet each of them believably individualized. What emerges is a picture of Russia more vivid than any I know, full of living detail and told in sharp and lively prose.

What interests me about this novel is that it shows how art can be totally independent of any message or philosophy—and that, despite the wishes of its own author. On its face it is tempting to read the book (or at least the first part) as a kind of satire on the institution of serfdom and the dysfunction of the Russian state. But the book will not sustain this reading. For one, Gogol was for serfdom, and the serfs themselves hardly play a role in this book. What is more, the whole scheme of buying dead souls, while amusing, is never the main attraction. Gogol is no reformer, at least not in the conventional sense. He is attracted to distinctive human types; and the book becomes more about the foibles of personalities rather than anything social or cultural.

Even more curious is that Gogol’s creative power broke down when he decided to convert this novel into a grand philosophical statement. This happened after he finished Part One, when he decided that he had a kind of messianic mission to save Russia. Part Two and Three would be equivalents to the Purgatorio and the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy, showing Chichikov turning away from vice and towards a properly Russian virtue. The strain of this heroic task eventually broke Gogol, it seems, and he burned his manuscripts and then starved himself.

What survives of Part Two, while admittedly only a draft, is considerably weaker than the first part. The focus on sharp personality is gone, and instead there are many long speeches about the virtue of being a productive landowner, the native power of the Russian culture, and so forth. Gogol would have Russians turn away from everything European and become serf-owning farmers cultivating their own gardens. This makes for unconvincing philosophy and stale writing. Nevertheless, I think this is quite interesting to see. For it shows that, contrary to what we often take for granted nowadays, a social mission is not exactly a good thing for a novelist. Gogol was more deeply incisive when he was doing it for the sake of creating an entertaining book.

And so Part One, which Gogol thought would be seen as a mere prelude to the profound message of the later works, is considered to be his defining vision. ...more

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Dec 13, 2013 Tej rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Everyone

Shelves: all-time-favorites

Almost, one and a three quarters of a century ago, Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol-Yanovsky or simply, Gogol, himself lend words to the cries of dissent against the likes of him,

“Don’t we ourselves know that there’s much in life that’s contemptible and stupid? As it is, we often have occasion to see things that are far from comforting. Better that you show us what’s beautiful and distracting. Better that we should forget ourselves!”

That very arrogance and contempt has rocketed far beyond, eulogizing a Almost, one and a three quarters of a century ago, Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol-Yanovsky or simply, Gogol, himself lend words to the cries of dissent against the likes of him,

“Don’t we ourselves know that there’s much in life that’s contemptible and stupid? As it is, we often have occasion to see things that are far from comforting. Better that you show us what’s beautiful and distracting. Better that we should forget ourselves!”

That very arrogance and contempt has rocketed far beyond, eulogizing all that is trash and sadly, maybe for the very reason that it is trash. The measure of cinema, at least here in my part of the world is by the millions that it rakes in irrespective of the nature of content, millions are proportional to the trash really or there is that noise which must be called music, not to mention the TV. We all are a part of that and beyond a point not willful perpetrators but just so hard pressed by life that there is little or no time to bother. It struck me the most, Gogol’s desire to produce something of significance, with a potential inclination towards inculcating the seeds of change among the individuals, indirectly goading and exhorting them and to somehow impact positively their lives and times. His self-assessed inability to achieve that coveted goal in writing, to an extent, led him to inflict self-damage by starvation and ultimate demise not to mention the burnings he carried out of his manuscript more than once. The first part of ‘Dead Souls’ leaves you most pleasantly dumbfounded and marveling at the precocious genius of this artist who paints human beings in prose, smiling and even positively laughing alone along with him and then, the second part of the same, incomplete and inconclusive, concluded his life journey quite literally. You wonder, why not just to continue writing with the kind of talent you were bestowed with? But then that is you talking in 2013 where ‘callings’ and ‘inner-voices’ are the last things to determine what and when you do what. Sadly I got to read Gogol saying this,

“God had taken away ‘for a long time my ability to create’, as a result of which ‘I have tormented myself, forced myself to write, suffered painfully at the spectacle of my impotence, and several times have made myself ill with the strain and have been unable to accomplish anything, and everything has come out forced and bad.’ ”

Pavel Ivanovich ‘Chichikov’, our heroic anti-hero cajoles us to accompany him, on pretty much aimless travels he has undertaken only driven by a supposedly ingenious yet untested and unproven idea of taking advantage of a loophole in the system, which putatively shall translate into real capital and a consequent plum life for his self. He is in fact on the mission to swindle bounty out of the system, keeping low and warding of the reach of law till he attains an un-approachable respectability in the society. He has the gumption to enshroud this trickery in a veil of un-burdening the prospective clients of the burden of ‘dead souls’ or the dead serfs, the tax one is obliged to pay because these serfs are counted as alive on the rolls with no chance of them being ticked of as dead until the subsequent census. He offers to even pay for them, peanuts that is, an item that exists only in thin air and aspires to mortgage them as real serfs while becoming a land-owner himself. Armed with an utterly ingratiating and ‘toady’ character, he ventures thus on his endeavours,

“My life can be likened, as it were, to a barque amid the waves, Your Excellency. I was swaddled, and one could say, wrapped in forbearance, myself being, so to speak, forbearance itself.”
……….
“Somehow the new arrival was never at a loss for anything, and he came across as an experienced man of the world. Whatever the topic of conversation, he always knew how to hold up his end: if the talk was of stud farm, he too would talk of stud farms; if people were chatting of fine dogs, here too he would venture some very sensible observations; if the matter under consideration touched upon an investigation being conducted by the fiscal chamber, he showed that he was not ignorant of judicial hanky-panky; if the discussion turned to billiards, he didn’t let his end down when it came to billiards either; if people were talking about virtue, then he could discourse on virtue very well too, and even with tears in his eyes; if about the distilling of spirits, then he knew a lot about spirits as well; if about custom inspectors and officials, then he could also expiate on them as if he himself had been both an official and an inspector.”

The rustic humor of the plot, in the dexterous hands of Gogol, is plied into a tragi-comic satire, one that embraces tightly, ingrained with a power to land hard blows with laughter. Gogol himself appears during the course of narration, monologues and casual talks flow, all of which happens in the ‘meanwhile’ in real time that is, which makes the text delightful. So much so, that even the carriage horses have their say at times.

“With us it’s different: we have men so wise that with a landowner who has two hundred souls they will speak in an altogether different way than with one who has three hundred, and with one who has three hundred they will, again, speak otherwise than with one who has five hundred, and with one who has five hundred, again it will be otherwise than with one who has eight hundred; in a word, you can get upto a million, and shadings will still be found.”

And then there is this landowner Chichikov meets in his quest to secure ‘dead souls’ whom he ends up describing thus,

“His smile was alluring, his hair blond and his eyes light blue. In the first moment of conversation with him, you could not help but say, ‘What a pleasant and kind hearted man!’ The second moment you would say nothing, and the third you would say, ‘The devil only knows what sort of man he is!’ and you would move as far away from him as you could; if you didn’t move away, you would experience a feeling of deadly boredom.”

Observing another lady in one of the landowner’s house, he goes ahead with,

“And in boarding schools, as we know, three main subjects constitute the foundation of human virtues: the French language, which is indispensable for a happy family life; the piano, for affording one’s spouse some pleasant moments; and finally, in the specifically homemaking skills, the knitting of purses and other surprises.”

Oscar Wilde famously said, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you” and Gogol epitomized that perfectly in trying to use comedy as a means towards perfecting individuals, one at a time with an ultimate aim to let that percolate and spread inside the entrails of the country, hopefully enlightening it as a whole. This contrasted starkly with the radicals trying to improve through systemic changes in social structures and government systems. So glaringly, this is the way to go even today and the need all the more acute.

Flowing descriptions of the pulchritude of Russian countryside, adorn the second part where Gogol wields a different quill albeit without giving up his knack of humor a wee bit. At times the brilliance is much more vivid and writing candid here than the first part even but only to be rudely reminded of its incompleteness and then it strikes as a disjointed piece on the whole. Perhaps to achieve perspicacity, he forays into the uncharted and flounders, dabbling with morality here and sermons there which do not quite gel with the tone and tenor hitherto attained and that is tragic.

“Like a tsar on the day of his solemn coronation, he was all aglow and it seemed as if rays of light were streaming from his face. Why, nowhere in the whole world will you find a delight to equal that. It’s precisely here that man imitates God. God reserved to himself the business of creation, as a delight second to none, and he demands of man that he too, in like measure, be the creator of prosperity all around him. And they call this boring work!”
......
“Yes, nature loves patience, and this is a law given it by God himself, who smiles on those who are patient.” (Reminds of Tolstoy)

In the final sections, which happen so strangely suddenly, if one is not aware of the fate of this text and its creator, one, to say the least can be left utterly dumbfounded.

“….. Why such a fate? Why such blows? Was my life not like a barque amid the waves even without all that? Where is the justice of the heavens? Where is the reward for patience, for exemplary perseverance?”
…….
“I can see, I can sense….. That the life I’m leading is not right, but I fell no great revulsion towards vice; my nature has grown coarse. I have no love for the good, for that beautiful inclination for doing deeds that are pleasing to God, which becomes second nature, habit.”
…….
“The dishonest business of taking bribes has become a necessity and a need even for those who were certainly not born to be dishonest. I know by now it is almost impossible for many people to swim against the current.”

My own naiveté as regards this work receded only gradually after the reading culminated and shoved me into an earnest quest to know the man himself. My only claims as to the knowledge of this work were cursory references of Dostoevsky and the likes, and I somehow expected it to be miles away from humour let alone comedy forming heart of the matter. I did not know what to expect and that was quite good actually.
Gogol’s life and times are enshrouded in dense fog with only his prolific letter writing providing a glimpse into the man and the artist that he was. Pushkin, evidently regarded as a mentor of had a famous falling apart and the two did not talk until Pushkin died in a duel. According to Gogol, it was Pushkin who visualized the ‘plot’ of Dead Souls and decided not to use it himself, encouraging him to amplify and deepen it. And Pushkin argued and coaxed him saying that it was just sinful not to do so, given the ability of Gogol to put his finger on a person and represent him fully as a human being in just a few strokes . Moreover he pushed him to emulate Cervantes, to rise above the scope of smaller works which he was currently writing and produce a work of the character and stature of Don Quixote while overcoming the shortcomings that his frail and capricious health represented. Later Gogol is believed to have said,

“ ‘Service’ to Russia, he said, was his abiding concern, and to that end he ‘wanted to present in my work primarily those higher qualities of the Russian nature, which have not yet been justly appreciated by all, and primarily those lower qualities which have not yet been sufficiently ridiculed and dispelled by all’.”

Gogol, right from the time of his first writings had a difficult time with criticism, burning text after text even only at slightest behest. His eccentricity and quirkiness culminated with his own life but it can be safely construed that in the present day and age, when goals are secondary, his prodigious precocity as a tragi-comic painter of realities of existence would have levitated him to precipitous heights. Even without that, his role and place in the echelons of Russian or even world writing traditions is incontrovertible, the evidences are replete in Tolstoy, Gorky or Dostoevsky and even Chekhov, who became who they did because he had been…..

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Apr 09, 2015 [P] rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: bitchin

For my review of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet I asked you to imagine that someone has given you a beautiful old watch, a gift with a catch, which is that it unfortunately does not work, is not, somehow, whole. Would you, in this situation, feel aggrieved, because the watch is not all that it could have been? Or are you happy to have it as it is, opining that you have gained something, rather than lost out, because you cannot lose something that never was [the watch had never and could ...more

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Apr 10, 2020 Edward rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction, 2020

I didn't love Dead Souls as much as everyone else seems to have. While there are certainly many outstanding elements in its compelling, comical characters and satirical reflections on Russian life in the early Nineteenth Century, I found the majority of the writing - particularly in the business negotiations that form the backbone of the novel - to be fairly repetitive, tiresome and drawn out.

The prose ranges from tight, beautiful and perceptive moments, to pages of rambling dialogue and descri ...more

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About Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

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Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian writer. Although many of his works were influenced by his Ukrainian heritage and upbringing, he wrote in the Russian language and his works are among the most beloved in the tradition of Russian literature.

Gogol is seen by most critics as the first Russian realist. His biting satire, comic realism, and descriptions of Russian provincials and pe ...more

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