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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
1) This book is legit funny. Not, like, funny for an old Russian book, I mean it's funny in any era/society. Just some absurd stuff in there that translates to the modern day beautifully, so that- I did not expect it, and the fact that I was actually grinning and chuckling over these 150 year old fictional characters was cool.
2) The book does slow down towards the end. Gogol you crazy beaut, you had something wonderful here. Not sure how it shoulda ended either, but it is slightly disappointing having such a masterpiece just kinda.. fizzle out.
3) It's still 5 stars. Part absurdist exaggeration, satire, yet all (seemingly) true to how Gogol saw Russia back in the day. Like, it's brilliant because the comedy serves a purpose. It's nice by itself, but using it to highlight the inefficiencies and illogical aspects of the old serf system is just brilliant. The landowners are caricatures of the fools that run the real Russian world in Gogol's day, and the reader gets humor whilst realizing how comical it makes the actual system and country themselves seem.
Summary: Chichikov wants dead souls. Dead serf souls. Because landowners still have to pay tax on them the landowners are willing to sell dead souls. But it's still weird, so people wonder what Chichikov is up to. Turns out he just wants to use the serfs as collateral on a massive loan, smart man him, but it all blows up in his face at the end. It's an interesting enough concept, but really just serves as motivation for Chichikov's Quixotian journey.
Worth a reread, honestly, doubt I'll ever get to that though. If you're expected a dry dusty old Russian tome.. no. This book is really funny, really interesting, and is only marred by a slight letdown of an ending.
2) The book does slow down towards the end. Gogol you crazy beaut, you had something wonderful here. Not sure how it shoulda ended either, but it is slightly disappointing having such a masterpiece just kinda.. fizzle out.
3) It's still 5 stars. Part absurdist exaggeration, satire, yet all (seemingly) true to how Gogol saw Russia back in the day. Like, it's brilliant because the comedy serves a purpose. It's nice by itself, but using it to highlight the inefficiencies and illogical aspects of the old serf system is just brilliant. The landowners are caricatures of the fools that run the real Russian world in Gogol's day, and the reader gets humor whilst realizing how comical it makes the actual system and country themselves seem.
Summary: Chichikov wants dead souls. Dead serf souls. Because landowners still have to pay tax on them the landowners are willing to sell dead souls. But it's still weird, so people wonder what Chichikov is up to. Turns out he just wants to use the serfs as collateral on a massive loan, smart man him, but it all blows up in his face at the end. It's an interesting enough concept, but really just serves as motivation for Chichikov's Quixotian journey.
Worth a reread, honestly, doubt I'll ever get to that though. If you're expected a dry dusty old Russian tome.. no. This book is really funny, really interesting, and is only marred by a slight letdown of an ending.
adventurous
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I'm not sure how much I have to add to a discussion of this book. It's awesome, especially in the first half, where Chichikov is still working out his rather obscure program, and along the way is encountering all sorts of weird and wonderfully funny folks. The writing is great, lots of really amazing similes like people always talk about, but just generally, an incredible level of energy in the writing-- it's the kind of thing that could wear you out if it wasn't so generous. I'm not certain what to make of the development of Chichikov as a character that (maybe) deserves a certain kind of respect and/ or sympathy-- the second half, or maybe better to say what exists of the second and third parts Gogol planned, are really different, esp after those first couple chapters.
It's an incredible treat to read this, and kind of an interesting exercise to try to fill in the gaps that are created in the second part of the book, how we could get from there to where the book ends up. But of course, where it ends up, in a kind of Christian-Carlyle styled moralism is a little hard to take, even if it prefigures Tolstoy.
It's an incredible treat to read this, and kind of an interesting exercise to try to fill in the gaps that are created in the second part of the book, how we could get from there to where the book ends up. But of course, where it ends up, in a kind of Christian-Carlyle styled moralism is a little hard to take, even if it prefigures Tolstoy.
funny
reflective
slow-paced
4 ⭐
I’m sure you’ve seen one of these wire ropes before. Working with cranes, I see the things every day which, for the life of me, is the only reason I can fathom, immediately after completing Gogol’s Dead Souls, having visualised the entire story in the form of a wire rope.
At first, and for the length of the entire first part, the story is fully realised. All the individual wires flow and interweave wonderfully to form the strands and in turn the strands are woven deftly around the core and it is as if there is some unseen load adding weight and therefore tension to the story. This is unhindered for the entirety of Part 1 in which we meet our (anti)hero, Chichikov, the charming con man, and follow him throughout his fumbling attempts to bring his latest get-rich-quick-scheme to fruition. For reasons that eventually become clear, Chichikov is going from landowner to landowner offering to purchase the names of their dead muzhiks purely from the goodness of his own heart (or so he would have us believe) in order to save the owners from paying a senseless tax on them in the time before the next census.
It is hilarious and thoughtful. The landowners whom Chichikov approaches verge on but never completely fall into the trap of being cartoonish caricatures, all embodying characteristics of the Russian gentry that Gogol wishes to highlight and/or scrutinise, most often in a satirical fashion. Though none of these landowners are fully fleshed out (as can be said of Chichikov until late in Part 1) they are entirely unforgettable!
And then the infamously fragmentary Part 2. There were two known manuscripts of the second part, both of which Gogol put to the flame as a combined result of his own self-doubt and perfectionism as well as external criticism. What remains is a text that becomes progressively more broken and incomplete with breaks in the text appearing as early as the first chapter of Part 2. Our wire rope is showing signs of wear; a kink here, a few wires unspooling themselves from a strand there; the rope has lost its structural integrity. Larger and larger chunks of character conversations and entire scenes are missing and where the translator hasn’t provided transitional material in the notes, the reader is left to guess what in the hell happened during the break.
Nevertheless, there are still inspired passages throughout Part 2 with a notably less light-hearted and more lecturey/moralistic tone. You feel as though there is still enjoyment to be had in the regrettably disconnected text but then it all ends very abruptly. As though the rope were cut in two or overloaded to the point that it snaps. The load is dropped and any tension that the rope was under is lost. All the strands that were woven so beautifully around the core and the wires from the strands unravel rapidly in a clockwise and anti-clockwise direction respectively, never to converge at their intended destination. Was Chichikov to earn his redemption or continue in his swindling ways? We’ll never know!
There were a couple of areas in Gogol’s “poema” that I found very interesting. For instance, how concerned Gogol appears to be about how his book and its characters will be perceived. He doesn’t seem to have had a lot of faith in the society of readers in Russia, perhaps justifiably so. Either way, he feels it necessary to defend at different times both his love for Russia and his philosophy and sense of certain obligations as a writer.
Gogol scorns the “so-called patriots” that will inevitably [upon reading his satirical critique of Russian ruling society] “scurry forth from all their corners, like spiders on seeing a fly entangled in their web, and suddenly raise the cry: ‘Is it really a good thing to bring that out into the light, to proclaim that publicly?... What will foreigners say? Is it really fun to hear a bad opinion of oneself?” and in the same way that Gogol anticipated Russians misinterpreting his critique, I have noted, in some modern readers, the same misunderstanding. That is that Gogol was making fun of Russia’s gentry for shits and giggles or as some kind of rebellious traitor. On the contrary, Gogol stated that he wanted to present in his work “primarily those higher qualities of the Russian nature, which have not yet been justly appreciated by all, and primarily those lower qualities that have not yet been sufficiently ridiculed and dispelled by all.” If I’m not mistaken, he is also defending his criticism of Russian society in the story of two ordinary citizens, Kifa Mokiyevich and his son Moky Kifovich. Saying, I believe, that he loves Russia as though it were a son and he has an obligation to point out areas of bad behaviour so that the son/nation can improve. After all if you love someone/something you don’t just blow smoke up their arse at every opportunity, you tell them when they need to pull their head in.
I’ll finish with what, for me, caused a complete 180° in how I interpreted the work. It came right at the end of Part 1 as Gogol, without hesitation, looked straight through me and exposed me as the sub-par and fraudulent reader I had been up until that point. I felt so blind that I almost wanted to go right back to the beginning and read the whole of Part 1 again. Here it is, thanks for reading:
”You fear the deep-penetrating gaze, you yourself are afraid to fix a deep-penetrating gaze on anything, you like to skim over everything with unthinking eyes. You will even have a hearty laugh at Chichikov, perhaps you will even praise the author, you will say: ‘Still and all, he’s been good at spotting a thing or two, he must be a jolly sort of fellow!’ And after these words you will turn to yourself with redoubled pride, a self-satisfied smile will appear on your face and you will add: ‘Really, one must agree that there are very strange and very amusing people in certain provinces, and no smaller number of scoundrels too!’ But who among you, filled with Christian humility, not publicly but silently, alone, at moments of solitary converse with yourself, will direct this weighty question into the deepest recesses of your own soul: ‘And isn’t there something of Chichikov in me too?’”
I’m sure you’ve seen one of these wire ropes before. Working with cranes, I see the things every day which, for the life of me, is the only reason I can fathom, immediately after completing Gogol’s Dead Souls, having visualised the entire story in the form of a wire rope.
At first, and for the length of the entire first part, the story is fully realised. All the individual wires flow and interweave wonderfully to form the strands and in turn the strands are woven deftly around the core and it is as if there is some unseen load adding weight and therefore tension to the story. This is unhindered for the entirety of Part 1 in which we meet our (anti)hero, Chichikov, the charming con man, and follow him throughout his fumbling attempts to bring his latest get-rich-quick-scheme to fruition. For reasons that eventually become clear, Chichikov is going from landowner to landowner offering to purchase the names of their dead muzhiks purely from the goodness of his own heart (or so he would have us believe) in order to save the owners from paying a senseless tax on them in the time before the next census.
It is hilarious and thoughtful. The landowners whom Chichikov approaches verge on but never completely fall into the trap of being cartoonish caricatures, all embodying characteristics of the Russian gentry that Gogol wishes to highlight and/or scrutinise, most often in a satirical fashion. Though none of these landowners are fully fleshed out (as can be said of Chichikov until late in Part 1) they are entirely unforgettable!
And then the infamously fragmentary Part 2. There were two known manuscripts of the second part, both of which Gogol put to the flame as a combined result of his own self-doubt and perfectionism as well as external criticism. What remains is a text that becomes progressively more broken and incomplete with breaks in the text appearing as early as the first chapter of Part 2. Our wire rope is showing signs of wear; a kink here, a few wires unspooling themselves from a strand there; the rope has lost its structural integrity. Larger and larger chunks of character conversations and entire scenes are missing and where the translator hasn’t provided transitional material in the notes, the reader is left to guess what in the hell happened during the break.
Nevertheless, there are still inspired passages throughout Part 2 with a notably less light-hearted and more lecturey/moralistic tone. You feel as though there is still enjoyment to be had in the regrettably disconnected text but then it all ends very abruptly. As though the rope were cut in two or overloaded to the point that it snaps. The load is dropped and any tension that the rope was under is lost. All the strands that were woven so beautifully around the core and the wires from the strands unravel rapidly in a clockwise and anti-clockwise direction respectively, never to converge at their intended destination. Was Chichikov to earn his redemption or continue in his swindling ways? We’ll never know!
There were a couple of areas in Gogol’s “poema” that I found very interesting. For instance, how concerned Gogol appears to be about how his book and its characters will be perceived. He doesn’t seem to have had a lot of faith in the society of readers in Russia, perhaps justifiably so. Either way, he feels it necessary to defend at different times both his love for Russia and his philosophy and sense of certain obligations as a writer.
Gogol scorns the “so-called patriots” that will inevitably [upon reading his satirical critique of Russian ruling society] “scurry forth from all their corners, like spiders on seeing a fly entangled in their web, and suddenly raise the cry: ‘Is it really a good thing to bring that out into the light, to proclaim that publicly?... What will foreigners say? Is it really fun to hear a bad opinion of oneself?” and in the same way that Gogol anticipated Russians misinterpreting his critique, I have noted, in some modern readers, the same misunderstanding. That is that Gogol was making fun of Russia’s gentry for shits and giggles or as some kind of rebellious traitor. On the contrary, Gogol stated that he wanted to present in his work “primarily those higher qualities of the Russian nature, which have not yet been justly appreciated by all, and primarily those lower qualities that have not yet been sufficiently ridiculed and dispelled by all.” If I’m not mistaken, he is also defending his criticism of Russian society in the story of two ordinary citizens, Kifa Mokiyevich and his son Moky Kifovich. Saying, I believe, that he loves Russia as though it were a son and he has an obligation to point out areas of bad behaviour so that the son/nation can improve. After all if you love someone/something you don’t just blow smoke up their arse at every opportunity, you tell them when they need to pull their head in.
I’ll finish with what, for me, caused a complete 180° in how I interpreted the work. It came right at the end of Part 1 as Gogol, without hesitation, looked straight through me and exposed me as the sub-par and fraudulent reader I had been up until that point. I felt so blind that I almost wanted to go right back to the beginning and read the whole of Part 1 again. Here it is, thanks for reading:
”You fear the deep-penetrating gaze, you yourself are afraid to fix a deep-penetrating gaze on anything, you like to skim over everything with unthinking eyes. You will even have a hearty laugh at Chichikov, perhaps you will even praise the author, you will say: ‘Still and all, he’s been good at spotting a thing or two, he must be a jolly sort of fellow!’ And after these words you will turn to yourself with redoubled pride, a self-satisfied smile will appear on your face and you will add: ‘Really, one must agree that there are very strange and very amusing people in certain provinces, and no smaller number of scoundrels too!’ But who among you, filled with Christian humility, not publicly but silently, alone, at moments of solitary converse with yourself, will direct this weighty question into the deepest recesses of your own soul: ‘And isn’t there something of Chichikov in me too?’”
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/1343219704) than to “War & Peace” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1343572901), 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...
“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/1343219704) than to “War & Peace” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1343572901), 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...
I forget how many times I've read Dead Souls but this is a much better version than the other one I first read. Some argue it is satire, though some argue it is not. My own experiences in growing up around the glorious Slavic peoples when spending my summers with my grandparents in the Styx, the characterizations that Gogol writes about them seem entirely all too based in reality. I find the book a marvelous read and heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to immerse themselves taking in Gogol's description of a bygone Russian era.
This is, quite possibly, the most fun I've ever had with a piece of classic literature. If you like Dickens or Russian literature, this is a must read.
