Dead Souls

His is in fact an inverted realism: the word creates the world in Dead Souls. This process is enacted, parodied, and commented upon all through the poem. One paradigm of it is the apostrophe to the "aptly uttered Russian word" at the end of chapter 5. The word in question is an unprintable epithet, which the author politely omits. It then becomes the subject of a panegyric in Gogol's best lyrical manner, which in its soaring rhetoric makes us forget that the aptly uttered word in question is not only an unprintable epithet, but in fact has not even been uttered. Another paradigm is the simile that ends the second paragraph of chapter 1: "In the corner shop, or, better, in its window, sat a seller of hot punch with a red copper samovar and a face as red as the samovar, so that from a distance one might have thought there were two samovars in the window, if one samovar had not had a pitch-black beard." This replacement of the person by the thing, of narrative reality by the figure of speech, occurs repeatedly in Dead Souls. The resulting hybrids—a bearded samovar— are essential Gogolian images. He was, in Annensky's words, "the one poet in the world who, in his ecstatic love of being—not of life, but precisely of being—was able to unite a dusty box of nails and sulphur with the golden streak in the eastern sky, and with whom a transparent and fiery maple leaf shining from its dense darkness did not dare to boast before a striped post by the roadside."

The highest instance of this love of being, revealed in the creative power of the word, is the moment in chapter 7 when Chichikov sits down in front of his chest, takes from it the lists of deceased peasants he has acquired, and draws up deeds of purchase for them. "Suddenly moved in his spirit," he says: “‘My heavens, there's so many of you crammed in here!'" He reads their names, and from the names alone begins to invent lives for them, resurrecting them one by one. Here, for the only time in the book, the author's voice joins with his hero's, as he takes the relay and continues the inventing himself. Absent presences, and presences made absent (like the five-foot sturgeon Sobakevich polishes off in chapter 8), are the materials of Gogol's poem. He plays on them in a thousand ways, in his intricate manipulation of literary conventions (as when the author profits from the fact that his hero has fallen asleep in order to tell his story), in the lying that goes on throughout the book (along with Chichikov's main business, there is also Nozdryov, who lies from a sort of natural generative force, or the "lady agreeable in all respects," who lies from inner conviction), in such details as the elaborately negated description of Italy superimposed on Russia near the start of chapter 11, or the prosecutor's bushy eyebrows ("all you had, in fact, was bushy eyebrows"—which is literally true). The tremendous paradox of the title—Dead Souls—is fraught with all the ambiguities of this inverted realism. "Everything resembles the truth." Such is Gogol's artistic procedure, the plunging into bottomless physicality of. . . the word. That is, an airy nothing.

The characters Chichikov meets are not real-life landowners, not unspoiled Russian natures or general human types; like the hero himself, they are elemental banalities. In this they are quite unlike the exuberant "souls" he resurrects from his chest. Gogol wrote in a letter of 1843:

I have been much talked about by people who have analyzed some of my aspects but failed to define my essence. Pushkin alone sensed it. He always told me that no other writer before has had this gift of presenting the banality of life so vividly, of being able to describe the banality of the banal man with such force that all the little details that escape notice flash large in everyone's eyes. That is my main quality, which belongs to me alone, and which indeed no other writer possesses.