Dead Souls, first published in 1842, is the great prose classic of Russia.  That amazing institution, “the Russian novel,” not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree.  Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work by the same author, a short story entitled The Cloak; this idea has been wittily expressed by another compatriot, who says:  “We have all issued out of Gogol’s Cloak.”

Dead Souls, which bears the word “Poem” upon the title page of the original, has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the Pickwick Papers, while E. M. Vogue places its author somewhere between Cervantes and Le Sage.  However considerable the influences of Cervantes and Dickens may have been ­the first in the matter of structure, the other in background, humour, and detail of characterisation ­the predominating and distinguishing quality of the work is undeniably something foreign to both and quite peculiar to itself; something which, for want of a better term, might be called the quality of the Russian soul.  The English reader familiar with the works of Dostoieffsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoi, need hardly be told what this implies; it might be defined in the words of the French critic just named as “a tendency to pity.”  One might indeed go further and say that it implies a certain tolerance of one’s characters even though they be, in the conventional sense, knaves, products, as the case might be, of conditions or circumstance, which after all is the thing to be criticised and not the man.  But pity and tolerance are rare in satire, even in clash with it, producing in the result a deep sense of tragic humour.  It is this that makes of Dead Souls a unique work, peculiarly Gogolian, peculiarly Russian, and distinct from its author’s Spanish and English masters.

Still more profound are the contradictions to be seen in the author’s personal character; and unfortunately they prevented him from completing his work.  The trouble is that he made his art out of life, and when in his final years he carried his struggle, as Tolstoi did later, back into life, he repented of all he had written, and in the frenzy of a wakeful night burned all his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls, only fragments of which were saved.  There was yet a third part to be written.  Indeed, the second part had been written and burned twice.  Accounts differ as to why he had burned it finally.  Religious remorse, fury at adverse criticism, and despair at not reaching ideal perfection are among the reasons given.  Again it is said that he had destroyed the manuscript with the others inadvertently.

The poet Pushkin, who said of Gogol that “behind his laughter you feel the unseen tears,” was his chief friend and inspirer.  It was he who suggested the plot of Dead Souls as well as the plot of the earlier work The Revisor, which is almost the only comedy in Russian.  The importance of both is their introduction of the social element in Russian literature, as Prince Kropotkin points out.  Both hold up the mirror to Russian officialdom and the effects it has produced on the national character.  The plot of Dead Souls is simple enough, and is said to have been suggested by an actual episode.

It was the day of serfdom in Russia, and a man’s standing was often judged by the numbers of “souls” he possessed.  There was a periodical census of serfs, say once every ten or twenty years.  This being the case, an owner had to pay a tax on every “soul” registered at the last census, though some of the serfs might have died in the meantime.  Nevertheless, the system had its material advantages, inasmuch as an owner might borrow money from a bank on the “dead souls” no less than on the living ones.  The plan of Chichikov, Gogol’s hero-villain, was therefore to make a journey through Russia and buy up the “dead souls,” at reduced rates of course, saving their owners the government tax, and acquiring for himself a list of fictitious serfs, which he meant to mortgage to a bank for a considerable sum.  With this money he would buy an estate and some real life serfs, and make the beginning of a fortune.

Obviously, this plot, which is really no plot at all but merely a ruse to enable Chichikov to go across Russia in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief.  “The comic,” explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, “is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, on the stage say, we shall roll about with laughter and only wonder we did not notice it before.”  But the comic in Dead Souls is merely external.  Let us see how Pushkin, who loved to laugh, regarded the work.  As Gogol read it aloud to him from the manuscript the poet grew more and more gloomy and at last cried out:  “God!  What a sad country Russia is!” And later he said of it:  “Gogol invents nothing; it is the simple truth, the terrible truth.”

The work on one hand was received as nothing less than an exposure of all Russia ­what would foreigners think of it?  The liberal elements, however, the critical Belinsky among them, welcomed it as a revelation, as an omen of a freer future.  Gogol, who had meant to do a service to Russia and not to heap ridicule upon her, took the criticisms of the Slavophiles to heart; and he palliated his critics by promising to bring about in the succeeding parts of his novel the redemption of Chichikov and the other “knaves and blockheads.”  But the “Westerner” Belinsky and others of the liberal camp were mistrustful.  It was about this time (1847) that Gogol published his Correspondence with Friends, and aroused a literary controversy that is alive to this day.  Tolstoi is to be found among his apologists.

Opinions as to the actual significance of Gogol’s masterpiece differ.  Some consider the author a realist who has drawn with meticulous detail a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him a great symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe the living of Russia as well as its dead.  Chichikov himself is now generally regarded as a universal character.  We find an American professor, William Lyon Phelps , of Yale, holding the opinion that “no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of his tongue.”  This is also the opinion held by Prince Kropotkin , who says:  “Chichikov may buy dead souls, or railway shares, or he may collect funds for some charitable institution, or look for a position in a bank, but he is an immortal international type; we meet him everywhere; he is of all lands and of all times; he but takes different forms to suit the requirements of nationality and time.”

Again, the work bears an interesting relation to Gogol himself.  A romantic, writing of realities, he was appalled at the commonplaces of life, at finding no outlet for his love of colour derived from his Cossack ancestry.  He realised that he had drawn a host of “heroes,” “one more commonplace than another, that there was not a single palliating circumstance, that there was not a single place where the reader might find pause to rest and to console himself, and that when he had finished the book it was as though he had walked out of an oppressive cellar into the open air.”  He felt perhaps inward need to redeem Chichikov; in Merejkovsky’s opinion he really wanted to save his own soul, but had succeeded only in losing it.  His last years were spent morbidly; he suffered torments and ran from place to place like one hunted; but really always running from himself.  Rome was his favourite refuge, and he returned to it again and again.  In 1848, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but he could find no peace for his soul.  Something of this mood had reflected itself even much earlier in the Memoirs of a Madman:  “Oh, little mother, save your poor son!  Look how they are tormenting him....  There’s no place for him on earth!  He’s being driven!...  Oh, little mother, take pity on thy poor child.”

All the contradictions of Gogol’s character are not to be disposed of in a brief essay.  Such a strange combination of the tragic and the comic was truly seldom seen in one man.  He, for one, realised that “it is dangerous to jest with laughter.”  “Everything that I laughed at became sad.”  “And terrible,” adds Merejkovsky.  But earlier his humour was lighter, less tinged with the tragic; in those days Pushkin never failed to be amused by what Gogol had brought to read to him.  Even Revizor (1835), with its tragic undercurrent, was a trifle compared to Dead Souls, so that one is not astonished to hear that not only did the Tsar, Nicholas I, give permission to have it acted, in spite of its being a criticism of official rottenness, but laughed uproariously, and led the applause.  Moreover, he gave Gogol a grant of money, and asked that its source should not be revealed to the author lest “he might feel obliged to write from the official point of view.”

Gogol was born at Sorotchinetz, Little Russia, in March 1809.  He left college at nineteen and went to St. Petersburg, where he secured a position as copying clerk in a government department.  He did not keep his position long, yet long enough to store away in his mind a number of bureaucratic types which proved useful later.  He quite suddenly started for America with money given to him by his mother for another purpose, but when he got as far as Lubeck he turned back.  He then wanted to become an actor, but his voice proved not strong enough.  Later he wrote a poem which was unkindly received.  As the copies remained unsold, he gathered them all up at the various shops and burned them in his room.

His next effort, Evenings at the Farm of Dikanka (1831) was more successful.  It was a series of gay and colourful pictures of Ukraine, the land he knew and loved, and if he is occasionally a little over romantic here and there, he also achieves some beautifully lyrical passages.  Then came another even finer series called Mirgorod, which won the admiration of Pushkin.  Next he planned a “History of Little Russia” and a “History of the Middle Ages,” this last work to be in eight or nine volumes.  The result of all this study was a beautiful and short Homeric epic in prose, called Taras Bulba.  His appointment to a professorship in history was a ridiculous episode in his life.  After a brilliant first lecture, in which he had evidently said all he had to say, he settled to a life of boredom for himself and his pupils.  When he resigned he said joyously:  “I am once more a free Cossack.”  Between 1834 and 1835 he produced a new series of stories, including his famous Cloak, which may be regarded as the legitimate beginning of the Russian novel.

Gogol knew little about women, who played an equally minor rôle in his life and in his books.  This may be partly because his personal appearance was not prepossessing.  He is described by a contemporary as “a little man with legs too short for his body.  He walked crookedly; he was clumsy, ill-dressed, and rather ridiculous-looking, with his long lock of hair flapping on his forehead, and his large prominent nose.”

From 1835 Gogol spent almost his entire time abroad; some strange unrest ­possibly his Cossack blood ­possessed him like a demon, and he never stopped anywhere very long.  After his pilgrimage in 1848 to Jerusalem, he returned to Moscow, his entire possessions in a little bag; these consisted of pamphlets, critiques, and newspaper articles mostly inimical to himself.  He wandered about with these from house to house.  Everything he had of value he gave away to the poor.  He ceased work entirely.  According to all accounts he spent his last days in praying and fasting.  Visions came to him.  His death, which came in 1852, was extremely fantastic.  His last words, uttered in a loud frenzy, were:  “A ladder!  Quick, a ladder!” This call for a ladder ­“a spiritual ladder,” in the words of Merejkovsky ­had been made on an earlier occasion by a certain Russian saint, who used almost the same language.  “I shall laugh my bitter laugh” was the inscription placed on Gogol’s grave.