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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
Read as I was becoming more learned in political economy. Dead Souls is a perfect satire of the burgeoning era of social climbing, taking the kind of critical work supplied by Balzac or Thackeray and transplanting it to Russian feudalism.
medium-paced
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
i finished this book and god was it funny! gogol was one hilarious guy. i suppose there would have been more things i understood if i was russian but unfortunately i am not. but the book was amazing still. however mr gogol has the habit to ramble on about something which i guess is some sort of russian lit thing but it gets kinda annoying. v good book tho, stan gogol.
oh i forgot! i was in a testing environment and the protagonist chichikov, when in a nice evening setting, mentioned that might like a wife and some "little chichikies" which was so funny to me i audibly giggled. caught me so off-guard, i loved it.
if you're trying to get into russian lit this is a place to start i think it's very accessible i am rather stupid and could understand it. oh also i read an edition which included the second volume of dead souls, which was in parts as gogol burned part of it or something. so if you have the second volume be warned some parts of it, including quite a few important plot points, are missing. one of my favorite painters ilya repin made a (frankly quite dramatic) painting of gogol burning the manuscript of dead souls, check that out if you want. good book thank you nikolai
oh i forgot! i was in a testing environment and the protagonist chichikov, when in a nice evening setting, mentioned that might like a wife and some "little chichikies" which was so funny to me i audibly giggled. caught me so off-guard, i loved it.
if you're trying to get into russian lit this is a place to start i think it's very accessible i am rather stupid and could understand it. oh also i read an edition which included the second volume of dead souls, which was in parts as gogol burned part of it or something. so if you have the second volume be warned some parts of it, including quite a few important plot points, are missing. one of my favorite painters ilya repin made a (frankly quite dramatic) painting of gogol burning the manuscript of dead souls, check that out if you want. good book thank you nikolai
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
4.5/5
In his study there was always some book lying about, with a bookmark laid in on page 14, which he had been steadily reading for two years by now.When it comes to judging Euro/Neo-Euro literature, it often boils down to some rather unimpressive factors: how much the writer was bound up in their respective nation's frontier, and whether they had a wife/mother/companion of the female persuasion on hand to fund/transcribe/otherwise make possible the physical manifestation of their more "cringe" writings for them. One may also consider what it means to have soul enough to acknowledge the tragicomedy of the reality around them but, in the long run, to not have means enough to survive it, but that's the sort of highfalutin sentiment that Gogol himself would peer at rather skeptically, so I won't spend too much time wallowing in such. Fortunately, this is Russia, so there is an entire world of familiar-but-not-quite to take on in terms of the past that Gogol inherited and the future that would outlive him, the lands that closely fed his society and the borderlands who still benefit from long distance imperialisms, and that peculiar breed of socialized dehumanization that in Russia is a comedy, in the US a catharsis, and in England a birthright. Still, for all that, little has changed during the last century-and-three-quarters in terms of what is espoused in "common sense" and what is taught by social norms, and if there's anything COVID has taught me, it's that those who most understand its realities will write something like 'Dead Souls', or Swift's 'A Modest Proposal', or [b:The Sellout|22237161|The Sellout|Paul Beatty|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403430899l/22237161._SX50_.jpg|41610676], where one must laugh if only to prevent oneself from crying forever. In any case, chances are good that those who would be frustrated in reading DS are frustrated now, so take this as your litmus test in terms of whether you prefer your classics à la Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Flaubert, or along the lines of Burney, Laclos, or de Assis. There's no guarantee that hating the former and/or loving the latter will put you in the frame of mind necessary for appreciating Gogol, but it probably wouldn't hurt.
This question abashed the Public Prosecutor. He had never yet happened to ask himself whether he was an old woman or whether he was something else.I tend to take certain things more seriously than modern convention dictates, so when an author is explicit about doing the same, I can't help but consider them a kindred spirit. Such a comradery could indeed be resting entirely on grotesque levels of misinterpretation, but considering what contemporaneous media spews out these days, I doubt I'm doing much damage in commiserating with someone who died nearly two centuries ago in a state of not-right-mindedness that, frankly, anyone would be driven to if one really took into account the flesh and blood of one's prosperous nation in the early 19th c., whether colonialism, slavery, or serfdom. In terms of Gogol's Russia, I got enough facts from [b:Catherine the Great|10414941|Catherine the Great Portrait of a Woman|Robert K. Massie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403395276l/10414941._SY75_.jpg|15319151] to understand the author's method of understatement, and the absurdist parallels between his corrupt bureaucracies of Russia and the shitshows that "first world" governments are enacting these days in their formal policies and on Twitter and Instagram are a marvel to behold, answering in his world, can one laugh in the time of mass brutal servile indenture, and in mine, can one laugh in the time of pandemic? For if 'Dead Souls' achieves anything, it does so in answering, yes. One must. It's not as if this is a work that passes the Bechdel Test or the Mako Mori Test or gives the slightest hint of anything behind the cishet mainstay of a society that maintains a reserve of infancy-surviving citizens for the sake of the next war. What it does is run the calculus gamut of its day and age, and the solutions it comes up with are the kind that push folks towards addiction, whether drugs, violence, sex, or religion. So the laws of the past made it not only possible, but profitable, to buy dead souls. Laws of today make it not only possible, but profitable, for certain nations to incarcerate Soviet Union level percentages of its own population and rely almost entirely on such when the country ever increasingly frequently sets itself on fire.
In short, everything was as beautiful as neither Nature alone nor art alone can conceive, but only as when they come together, when over the labor of man, often heaped up without any sense, Nature will run her conclusive burin, will lighten the heavy masses, will do away with the coarsely palpable regularity and the beggar's rents, through which the unconcealed, naked plan peers through, and bestow a wondrous warmth to everything that had been created amid the frigidity of a measured purity and tidiness.Perhaps if Gogol had been as far removed from the mechanisms of his country's bloodstreams as an Evans or a Fitzgerald was, he would have been able to embrace either fully content happiness or unthinkingly content sadness, not some ever self-questioning mixture of the two that looked over his nation and its world and wondered whether 'twas more logical to hope or to despair. As it stands, we have a work that thought itself through so much that the fate that would eventually befall both its successors and its creator was almost guaranteed, for if the 19th century was good at anything, it was combining in its literary representatives the ability to write as if they were alive today with the susceptibility to suffering from some of the most horrific methods, whether biologically incipient or socially ingrained, of instigating the complete and total deterioration of the human body, mind, and soul. Carbon monoxide poisoning is a hypothesis for what composes both biography and bibliography of Edgar Allen Poe, and the facts surrounding Gogol's own literature and life conjure up similar thoughts of unfortunate personal tendencies combining with breaks-the-camel's-back coincidences. As for this particular work, I'm glad it took me nearly a decade of experiencing certain histories in third person and living certain plagues in first to get to it. It allowed me to laugh while remaining mindful, think while staying relative, commit to reading without staying too attached to conventional standards of narratology, and feel that the story had a point to it without demanding that the author completely butt out of his own creation. The fact that both popular dictate and the Soviet Union look generally favorably on Gogol and his output is something to consider, but how much of it is/was misunderstood and how much of it is/was slipping through the cracks is a question I'll leave to those who are paid to write about such.
"It's all very well," he says to himself, "for the grand man to be saying that I ought to find my own means of subsistence and that I ought to help myself. Very well, then," says he, "I," he says, "will find the means, all right!"Despite all that, I have absolutely no plans, whether physically enacted or digitally inscribed, of reading any more of this author's output. At some point I may feel the need to, but for now? I'm rather proud of the mechanisms I've built up over the years for the purposes of avoiding the temptations of completely flying off the handle and starving oneself to death, so I'll be letting my reading trajectory continue on unenforced and falling out where it may accordingly.
[B]ut whether it's really possible to withstand the Devil or not is not an author's business to judge.
Whither art thou soaring away to, then, Russia? Give me thy answer! But Russia gives none. With a wondrous ring does the jingle-bell trill; the air, rent to shreds, thunders and turns to wind; all things on earth fly past and, eyeing it askance, all the other peoples and nations stand aside and give it the right of way.
adventurous
funny
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Vol. 1 feels like a prequel for the rest of the novel, and then the rest of the novel hardly exists. It really is a shame the other volumes were destroyed because Vol. 2 had SO much potential. I loved many of the new characters and would've loved to see how they actually all connected by the end.
adventurous
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes