29/08/2023
“The muzhik is lazy, he doesn’t like to work, all he thinks about is some way of getting to the pothouse…It looks like I’ll end my days as a wandering beggar!’
‘People have been telling me, however,’ Chichikov observed gingerly, ‘that you own more than a thousand souls.’
‘Who’s been telling you that? You, my dear sir, should have spat in the eye of the man who told you that! He must have been joking, he wanted to make fun of you. They babble on about a thousand souls, but just you go and try to count them, and you’ll come up with absolutely nothing! The last three years the damned fever has killed off a goodly number of my muzhiks.’
“Dead Souls” by Nikolay Gogol (Trans by Robert A. Maguire) Penguin Classics, 2004, page 135
(First published in 1842, 1855)
Gogol (meaning ‘golden-eyed duck’) was originally Ukrainian but wrote in Russian—and his syntax was considered quite unusual (‘not a drop of Russian blood flowed in his veins’), yet he was considered one of the most Russian of the writers.
Gogol creates a grotesque gallery of human types in Dead Souls, including the ‘devilish con man Chichikov’ in an ‘ebullient masterpiece.’
Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these ‘souls’ as collateral to re-invent himself as a gentleman.
Dead Souls, considered Russia’s first major novel, is a ‘devastating satire on social hypocrisy.’
Nabokov calls Gogol ‘a strange creature’, and says ‘but then genius is always strange.’
