Dead Souls

We come now to the boldest and most central word in Gogol's design: Poema. It is clearly meant to alert readers to the author's own conception of his work, to warn them that what is to come is not a novel—that is, an extended prose narrative portraying characters and actions representative of real life, in a plot of more or less complexity, as the manuals have it. In fact, Gogol himself sometimes referred to Dead Souls as a novel, for instance in the letter to Pushkin quoted earlier. But that was precisely earlier. As his work progressed, his sense of it grew and changed. Finally, several times in the text itself, and here on its title page, he resolutely asserted its poemity.

Our understanding of what Gogol meant in calling his book a poem is helped considerably by a little manual he wrote himself in the latter part of his life. It is entitled A Guidebook of Literature for Russian Youth and contains, among other things, some interesting remarks on the novel as a genre. He describes it as "too static" a form, involving a set of characters introduced at the start and bound to a series of incidents necessarily related to the hero's fate, allowing only for an "overly compressed interaction" among them. If we reverse these strictures, we will have the beginnings of a formal description of Dead Souls: a dynamic form, involving characters not necessarily bound up with the hero's fate, who can be introduced (and dropped) at any point, and allowing the author great freedom of movement in time, place, and action. In his guidebook, Gogol introduced his concept of such a form, midway between the novel and the epic, calling it "minor epic." His examples are Don Quixote and Orlando Furioso. While the epic hero is always an important and conspicuous public figure, the hero of a minor epic can be private and socially insignificant. The author leads him through a series of adventures and changes intended at the same time to present a living picture of the age, a chart of its uses and abuses, and "a full range of remarkable human phenomena." Indeed, Gogol plunges so much in médias res that we learn nothing about his hero's life until the last chapter of volume 1. Figures and events emerge the way the "dead souls" emerge from Chichikov's chest in the seventh chapter, not part of any plot, but indispensable to the poem. So, too, the theme of Russia ("Rus!") does not derive from situation or character, but is added lyrically by the author, forming part of the poetical ambience of the book, as do the many epic or mock epic similes, the asides, the lyrical flights and apostrophes. To portray "all Russia," Gogol needed this freedom of the road, of movement in several senses, allowing him to include a diversity of images, to multiply views metaphorically, because the road is also the writing itself, the "scrawling" of landscapes along the racing britzka's way. All this is what is promised by the word poema.

Many of those who heard Gogol read from the second volume of Dead Souls (some listened to as many as seven chapters) praised it in terms similar to those of his friend L. I. Arnoldi, who described such a reading in a memoir of his friendship with the author: “‘Amazing, incomparable!' I cried. 'In these chapters you come even closer to reality than in the first volume; here one senses life everywhere, as it is, without any exaggerations Could this be the same Gogol? Had he finally stooped to writing a conventional novel? But, in fact, what we find in the surviving fragments of volume 2 is not life "as it is," but a series of non-pareils—the perfect young lady, the perfect landowner, the perfect wealthy muzhik, the perfect prince, and also, since nonpareils need not be moral ideals, the perfect ruined nobleman, the perfect Germanizer, the perfect do-nothing—all of them verging on the grotesque, but on an unintentional and humorless grotesque. While we can see where Gogol was straining to go, we are aware mostly of the strain. He is still arm in arm with his hero at the end, but, as he says, "This was not the old Chichikov. This was some wreckage of the old Chichikov. The inner state of his soul might be compared with a demolished building, which has been demolished so that from it a new one could be built; but the new one has not been started yet, because the definitive plan has not yet come from the architect and the workers are left in perplexity." Amid the rubble and perplexity of the second volume, the unsinkable squire Petukh, met by chance when Chichikov takes a wrong road, sounds the last great cockcrow of Gogol's genius.

II