Take a photo of a barcode or cover
cartoonmicah 's review for:
Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
There are many great classic Russian authors I’ve come to admire, but Gogol is the only one who writes satire. Chekhov can be ironic and funny, but Gogol is experimental and absurd in a way that lines up with so many other authors I enjoy. After reading a short story by him a while ago, I was eager to give Dead Souls a try when I understood the premise.
Dead Souls was written before serfdom was abolished in Russia. Peasants were owned in parcel with the land they lived on and worked and wealthy landowners could buy, sell, and be taxed for them as property. The title Dead Souls is a double entendre, referring both to the plot of the book (buying the rights to dead peasants) and the “dead souls” of the politically corrupt and morally bankrupt upper middle class of Russia at the time.
Dead Souls follows Chichikov on his new quest in a new town, seeking after questionably attained wealth. Once a simple government employee taking bribes like the rest, he is now destitute after being caught out and has been left with only a pitance and no prospects. But his new scheme is unique and so simple that it’s beautiful. If he can attain the rights to “own” dead serfs who are not yet registered by census as deceased, he can mortgage them as property and use the money to become a legitimate landowner. Showing up in a new town and ingratiating himself to every politician, landlord, and business leader, he is soon the talk of the town without anyone knowing a single fact about his background. From here, Chichikov goes about the seemingly simple task of visiting his new neighbors and finding a way to take the ownership of their dead serfs off their hands.
If people have to pay taxes on these dead souls, it seems easy enough to get them to hand them over, doesn’t it? Chichikov finds it is not so. Along the way, he meets every kind of lazy, suspicious, wily, rascally landowner that ever existed. Every sort of comic character and any foreseeable mismanagement of wealth is put on delightful display. In the end, Chichikov survives with his life and a nice bundle of deeds to the dead.
From here, he travels to a new town and begins to meet people among whom he might learn to live if he can now acquire a loan for property. These people are also comic, but their aspect is typically more serious as their failing and strengths are displayed in the quality of life among their people and in their region. Chichikov begins to daydream more and more about how to avoid pitfalls and emulate the bastions among society, until he bites off a bit more scheme than he can chew.
In the end, I felt like the book dwindled away without a climax. It started out hilarious for the first three quarters and then began to get serious and meander. Gogol uses some interesting devises to cut in and out of conversations, but it feels as if he doesn’t know where to go or as if he is losing interest in the plot himself. The book ends rather oddly but not in a wholly unsatisfactory manner. He could have really teased out the ending into a comic masterpiece, but instead we are left with a very serious decision between a continued life of petty theft and bribery or a chance to redeem it all for a better moral centering. We don’t know what Chichikov walks away with exactly, but we are left with a championing of change in the moral fiber of the Russian public.
Dead Souls was written before serfdom was abolished in Russia. Peasants were owned in parcel with the land they lived on and worked and wealthy landowners could buy, sell, and be taxed for them as property. The title Dead Souls is a double entendre, referring both to the plot of the book (buying the rights to dead peasants) and the “dead souls” of the politically corrupt and morally bankrupt upper middle class of Russia at the time.
Dead Souls follows Chichikov on his new quest in a new town, seeking after questionably attained wealth. Once a simple government employee taking bribes like the rest, he is now destitute after being caught out and has been left with only a pitance and no prospects. But his new scheme is unique and so simple that it’s beautiful. If he can attain the rights to “own” dead serfs who are not yet registered by census as deceased, he can mortgage them as property and use the money to become a legitimate landowner. Showing up in a new town and ingratiating himself to every politician, landlord, and business leader, he is soon the talk of the town without anyone knowing a single fact about his background. From here, Chichikov goes about the seemingly simple task of visiting his new neighbors and finding a way to take the ownership of their dead serfs off their hands.
If people have to pay taxes on these dead souls, it seems easy enough to get them to hand them over, doesn’t it? Chichikov finds it is not so. Along the way, he meets every kind of lazy, suspicious, wily, rascally landowner that ever existed. Every sort of comic character and any foreseeable mismanagement of wealth is put on delightful display. In the end, Chichikov survives with his life and a nice bundle of deeds to the dead.
From here, he travels to a new town and begins to meet people among whom he might learn to live if he can now acquire a loan for property. These people are also comic, but their aspect is typically more serious as their failing and strengths are displayed in the quality of life among their people and in their region. Chichikov begins to daydream more and more about how to avoid pitfalls and emulate the bastions among society, until he bites off a bit more scheme than he can chew.
In the end, I felt like the book dwindled away without a climax. It started out hilarious for the first three quarters and then began to get serious and meander. Gogol uses some interesting devises to cut in and out of conversations, but it feels as if he doesn’t know where to go or as if he is losing interest in the plot himself. The book ends rather oddly but not in a wholly unsatisfactory manner. He could have really teased out the ending into a comic masterpiece, but instead we are left with a very serious decision between a continued life of petty theft and bribery or a chance to redeem it all for a better moral centering. We don’t know what Chichikov walks away with exactly, but we are left with a championing of change in the moral fiber of the Russian public.