This comic novel, or “epic,” as the author labeled it, reflects feudal Russia, with its serfdom and bureaucratic iniquities. Chichikov, the hero of the novel, is a polished swindler who, after several reverses of fortune, wants to get rich quick. His bright but criminal idea is to buy from various landowners a number of their recently deceased serfs (or “souls,” as they were called in Russia) whose deaths have not yet been registered by the official census and are therefore regarded as still being alive. The landowners are only too happy to rid themselves of the fictitious property on which they continue to pay taxes until the next census. Chichikov intends to pawn the “souls” in a bank and, with the money thus raised, settle down in a distant region as a respectable gentleman. The provincial townsmen of his first stop are charmed by his polite manners; he approaches several owners in the district who are all willing to sell the “souls” in question, knowing full well the fraudulent nature of the deal. The sad conditions of Russia, in which serfs used to be bought and sold like cattle, are evident throughout the grotesquely humorous transactions. The landowners, one more queer and repellent than the last, have become nicknames known to every Russian reader. When the secret of Chichikov's errands begins to leak out, he hurriedly leaves the town.
Dead Souls was published in 1842, the same year in which the first edition of Gogol's collected works was published. The edition included, among his other writings, a sprightly comedy titled Zhenitba (Marriage) and the story “The Overcoat.” The latter concerns a humble scribe who, with untold sacrifices, has acquired a smart overcoat; when robbed of it he dies of a broken heart. The tragedy of this insignificant man was worked out with so many significant trifles that, years later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was to exclaim that all Russian realists had come “from under Gogol's greatcoat.” The apex of Gogol's fame was, however, Dead Souls. The democratic intellectuals of Belinsky's brand saw in this novel a work permeated with the spirit of their own liberal aspirations. Its author was all the more popular because after Pushkin's tragic death Gogol was now looked upon as the head of Russian literature. Gogol, however, began to see his leading role in a perspective of his own. Having witnessed the beneficent results of the laughter caused by his indictments, he was sure that God had given him a great literary talent in order to make him not only castigate abuses through laughter but also to reveal to Russia the righteous way of living in an evil world. He therefore decided to continue Dead Souls as a kind of Divine Comedy in prose; the already published part would represent the Inferno of Russian life, and the second and third parts (with Chichikov's moral regeneration) would be its Purgatorio and Paradiso.
Creative decline.
Unfortunately, having embarked upon such a soul-saving task, Gogol noticed that his former creative capacity was deserting him. He worked on the second part of his novel for more than 10 years but with meagre results. In drafts of four chapters and a fragment of the fifth found among his papers, the negative and grotesque characters are drawn with some intensity, whereas the virtuous types he was so anxious to exalt are stilted and devoid of life. This lack of zest was interpreted by Gogol as a sign that, for some reason, God no longer wanted him to be the voice exhorting his countrymen to a more worthy existence. In spite of this he decided to prove that at least as teacher and preacher—if not as artist—he was still able to set forth what was needed for Russia's moral and worldly improvement. This he did in his ill-starred Bybrannyye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami (1847; Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends), a collection of 32 discourses eulogizing not only the conservative official church but also the very powers that he had so mercilessly condemned only a few years before. It is no wonder that the book was fiercely attacked by his one-time admirers, most of all by Belinsky, who in an indignant letter called him “a preacher of the knout, a defender of obscurantism and of darkest oppression.” Crushed by it all, Gogol saw in it a further proof that, sinful as he was, he had lost God's favour forever. He increased his prayers and his ascetic practices; in 1848 he even made a pilgrimage to Palestine, but in vain. Despite a few bright moments he began to wander from place to place like a doomed soul. Finally he settled in Moscow, where he came under the influence of a fanatical priest, Father Matvey Konstantinovsky, who seems to have practiced on Gogol a kind of spiritual sadism. Ordered by him, Gogol burned the presumably completed manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls on Feb. 24 (Feb. 11, O.S.), 1852. Ten days later he died, on the verge of semimadness.
Influence and reputation.
Whatever the vagaries of Gogol's mind and life, his part in Russian literature was enormous. Above all, it was from the nature of such works as The Government Inspector, Dead Souls, and “The Overcoat” that Belinsky derived the tenets of the “natural school” (as distinct from the “rhetorical,” or Romantic, school) that was responsible for the trend of subsequent Russian fiction. Gogol was among the first authors to have revealed Russia to itself. Yet in contrast to the simple classical-realistic prose of Pushkin, adopted by Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Goncharov, and Ivan Turgenev, Gogol's ornate and agitated prose was assumed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor). Gogol's realism of indictment found many followers, among them the great satirist Mikhail Saltykov. He was also a champion of the little man as a literary hero. His vexation of spirit, too, was continued (but on a higher level) by both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as was his effort to transcend “mere literature.”
Janko Lavrin
Additional Reading
Biographies include Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (1944, reissued 1989), an astute and rather subjective monograph; Victor Erlich, Gogol (1969), an excellent study; Henri Troyat, Divided Soul (1973, also published as Gogol, 1974); and V.V. Gippius, Gogol (1981). Critical studies may be found in Paul Debreczeny, Nikolay Gogol and His Contemporary Critics (1966); Robert A. Maguire (compiler), Gogol from the Twentieth Century (1974); Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (1976), the definitive study of Gogol and sexuality; Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (1979), which analyzes the author in the context of his times; and Richard Peace, The Enigma of Gogol (1981).
Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich
▪ Russian literary critic
born May 30 [June 11, New Style], 1811, Sveaborg, Fin., Russian Empire
died May 26 [June 7], 1848, St. Petersburg, Russia
eminent Russian literary critic who is often called the “father” of the Russian radical intelligentsia.
The son of a provincial doctor, Belinsky was expelled from the University of Moscow (1832) and earned his living thereafter as a journalist. His first substantial critical articles were part of a series that he wrote for the journal Teleskop (“Telescope”) beginning in 1834. These were called “Literaturnye mechtaniya” (“Literary Reveries”), and they established his reputation. In them he expounded F.W.J. Schelling's Romantic view of national character, applying it to Russian culture.
Belinsky was briefly managing editor of the Moskovsky nablyudatel (“Moscow Observer”) before obtaining a post in 1839 as chief critic for the journal Otechestvennyye zapiski (“National Annals”). The influential essays he published there on such writers as Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolay Gogol helped shape the literary and social views of other Russian intellectuals for decades to come. By 1840 Belinsky had moved from the idealism of his early essays to a Hegelian view that art and the history of a nation are closely connected. He believed that Russian literature had to progress in order to help the still-embryonic Russian nation develop into a mature, civilized society. His theory of literature in the service of society became an article of faith among Russian liberals and was the distant progenitor of the Soviets' doctrine of Socialist Realism.