Dead Souls

They'd plant it right, but what came up you couldn't say: it's not a watermelon, it's not a pumpkin, it's not a cucumber. . . devil knows what it is!

N. Gogol, The Enchanted Spot That genius was purely literary. Gogol was a born writer, and his minor epic is a major feast of Russian prose. It caused a sensation when it first appeared, almost all of its characters immediately became proverbial, and its reputation has never suffered an eclipse. The book entered into and became fused with Russian life, owing mainly to its verbal power. The poet Innokenty Annensky, in his essay "The Aesthetics of Dead Souls and Its Legacy" (1909), asked: "What would have become of our literature if he alone for all of us had not taken up this burden and this torment and plunged in bottomless physicality our still so timid, now reasonable, now mincing, even if luminously aerial, Pushkinian word?" (Annensky's italics.) The phrase "plunged in bottomless physicality" nicely evokes both the material exuberance of Gogol's style and its artistic procedure.

Such qualities were largely ignored by the first critics of Dead Souls, who paid little attention to matters of style. They were most anxious to place Gogol's work within the social polemics of the time, to make him a partisan of one side or the other. Both sides stressed Gogol's "realism" (which we may find surprising), seeing his book as a living portrait of Russia, an embodiment of typical Russian life and of what, following Pushkin, they called "the Russian spirit" or "breath." Gogol represented the first appearance in Russian literature of everyday provincial life in all its details (Belinsky praised in particular the "executed" louse in chapter 8, seeing it as a challenge to literary gentility). Where the critics disagreed was on the character of that life and the nature of its appearance. The Slavophils saw the book as an image of deep Russia, "wooden" Russia, and saw in the figure of the coachman Selifan, for example, a portrait of the "unspoiled" Russian nature. They laughed merrily with Gogol. The radicals saw the book as an attack on landowners and bureaucrats, an unmasking of the social reality hypocritically denied by the ruling classes, and a denunciation of the evils of serf owning. For the Slavophils, Dead Souls was the first book fully to embrace Russian reality; for the radicals it represented Gogol's rejection of Russian reality and his (at least implicit) opposition to the established order. You may laugh at these characters in Gogol's book, wrote Belinsky, but you would not laugh at them in real life. The book is only superficially funny; it lays bare the nonsense and triviality of Russian life, implicitly asking how all this could become so important, and in this it is both profound and serious.

Soviet Marxist criticism continued in Belinsky's line, adding its own ideological formulas. Thus Dead Souls turned out to be progressive in bringing out the contradictions latent in Russian society of the 1840s—the decay of the old feudal, serf-owning class, and the emergence of its class enemy, the capitalist, in the person of Chichikov (who is also contradictory and in transition). Its characters, representing broad and typical generalities of the time, are determined by their economic behavior—greed, prodigality, acquisitiveness, idleness. Gogol exposes the evils of arbitrary rule, bureaucratic corruption, and petty self-interest, and thus prepares the way for social change. And so on.

Such programmatic readings are themselves contradicted on every page of Dead Souls, nowhere more explicitly than when the author, after describing Plyushkin's descent into worthlessness, pettiness, and vileness, suddenly cries out: "Does this resemble the truth? Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man." If "everything resembles the truth," then the laws of this resemblance are of a peculiar sort, and the reality they correspond to is incalculable. That such a will-o'-the-wisp can come so vividly to life is a tribute to the magic of Gogol's prose, with its "plunge into bottomless physicality."