Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

In order to read Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 masterpiece, one must first get past the title page. From the very beginning, the title Dead Souls has been both a stumbling block and a touchstone: an enigma whose solution reveals more about the solver than about itself. There is of course a clear, seemingly mundane referent for the phrase “dead souls”: before 1861, Russia was a serf-owning society; these serfs were sometimes referred to as “souls,” especially when being counted for tax purposes. Serfs who died after one of the periodic censuses were, until the next census, still considered taxable property despite their nonexistence. The hero of Dead Souls, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, makes a series of visits to the landowners in an unnamed provincial town, offering to buy these “dead souls” at a cut-rate price, thus relieving their owners of a tax burden and obtaining for himself property that can later be mortgaged fraudulently. The mundane explanation, however, has never exorcised the title Dead Souls of its disturbing, haunting mystery. One of the earliest readers of the novel, the chairman of the Moscow Censorship Committee, reacted violently to the mocking challenge of Gogol’s title, as Gogol himself recounted in a letter of January 1842: As soon as the chairman heard the title Dead Souls, he began to shout in the voice of an ancient Roman: “No, this I will never permit: the soul is immortal; there cannot be such a thing as a dead soul, the author is taking a stand against immo...