Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

As in enlightened Europe, so too in enlightened Russia there are now a great many respectable people who cannot dine at an inn without striking up a conversation with a servant, sometimes even having a good laugh at his expense.

Alas! The fat ones of this world know how to manage their affairs better than the thin ones. The thin ones are mostly employed on special assignments or are merely carried on the civil service list, and flit about hither and yon. Their existence is weightless, insubstantial and utterly insecure. The fat men, on the other hand, never occupy peripheral positions but always central ones, and if they do sit down somewhere, then they sit securely and firmly, and the seat would sooner crack and sag beneath them than they would fly off it. They have no liking for external glitter; their tail-coats are not so artfully cut as those of the thin men, yet their coffers

Haha I love this one ... really keeps within the humorous spirit of Gogol

But the author is very much ashamed of taking up so much of his readers’ time with people of the lower class, knowing from experience how unwilling they are to make the acquaintance of the lower orders. Such indeed is the Russian: he has a powerful passion for rubbing shoulders with anyone who might stand one rank higher than himself, and a nodding acquaintance with a count or a prince he deems preferable to any intimate friendships.

A Russian driver has good instinct in place of eyes, and that explains why it happens that, with eyes fast shut, he sometimes careens along at full tilt and yet manages to reach some destination or other.

It must be said that in this Rus of ours, if we have not yet kept pace with foreigners in this or that respect, then we have far outstripped them in our knowledge of the proper way to behave. It

in an instant joy can turn into sadness, if only you linger too long before it, and then God only knows what will pop into your head.

The only thing a dead body is good for is propping up a fence, as the proverb says.’

There’s no law regulating taste: some love the priest, others love the priest’s wife, as the proverb says.’

That which is aptly uttered is the same as that which is written down: there’s no chopping it out with an axe. Indeed, how very apt is everything that has emerged from the depths of Rus, where there are neither Germans, nor Finns, nor any other sort of tribe, but where everything is home-grown, where the living and lively Russian mind, which is never at a loss for a word and does not hatch it the way a brood-hen does her young, but just goes ahead and slaps it on, like a passport to be carried forever, and there’s no point in later trying to add the kind of nose or lips you have – with a single stroke you have been delineated from head to toe!

With a deep knowledge of the heart and a wise grasp of life will the word of the Briton resound; like a flippant fop will the ephemeral word of the Frenchman glitter and burst; ingeniously will the German contrive his shrewdly spare word, which is not accessible to all; but there is no word so sweeping, so bold, so torn from under the heart itself, so bubbling and quivering with life, as the aptly uttered Russian word.