Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

Belyi perhaps came closest to the mark when he wrote that “Gogol, being a laboratory for linguistic experiments, cannot be closed by a canon.”5 Certainly Dead Souls embodies what the critic Mikhail Bakhtin called “potential,” the capacity for a work of art to change its meaning over time, in fruitful dialogue with its readers. And this is where the phrase “dead souls” acquires a new, radiant significance: the empty space provided by the dead, unknowable peasants inspires creative imaginative play even in the soulless Chichikov, who in Chapter 7, when imagining the lives and deaths of the serfs he has bought, becomes a poet and a teller of tales, if only for a moment. Gogol’s reader is invited to join him—and many do. To return to the problematic title: When Bernard Guilbert Guerney’s brilliant translation of Dead Souls was first published in 1942, the book club that offered it to its readers repeated the action of the Russian censors exactly 100 years before, changing the title to Chichikov’s Journeys; on Home Life in Old Russia. They were not concerned with upholding the immortality of the soul or defending the institution of serfdom, but with preventing their readers from forming a creepy, forbidding impression of the work. In Vladimir Nabokov’s immortal phrase, they feared “suggesting gloomy ideas to rosy-cheeked comic strip fans.”6 Here again the censors have a point. Neither the title nor most critics’ readings give an accurate idea of the work’s magnificent humor, th...