Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

On the mundane level, Chichikov’s day-to-day activity, his obsessive bargaining for “dead souls,” is a constant reminder of the hideous moral ulcer that a society founded on slavery can never hide or heal. Readers of Dead Souls in the decades following its appearance in 1842 tended to choose one of these two aspects of the work to focus on: its portrait of the human soul, especially in the context of Russian Orthodox theology, or its savagely satirical excoriation of the evils of nineteenth-century Russian society. Appropriately enough, the reading of Dead Souls as social commentary predominated in the years immediately following the novel’s publication. The most influential nineteenth-century reader of Gogol, the radical critic Vissarion Belinskii, saw Dead Souls as a work of unflinching realism and social criticism “that mercilessly rips the coverings from reality.”2 A like-minded reader, Alexander Herzen, called the work “a practical course for studying Russia,” a “series of pathological sketches taken from nature.”3 For these critics, Gogol’s examination of the underside of Russian life—what the narrator of Dead Souls calls “all that fearsome, overwhelming slimy morass of minutiae that have bogged down our life”—was the act of a civic-minded patriot as much as of an artist. The reading of Dead Souls as a ruthlessly realistic depiction of Russian society held sway through much of the nineteenth century (and returned in the mid-twentieth century to become the orthodox So...