). It's hard for him at home. “Everything, even the very air, torments and suffocates me,” he says. In the summer of 1842, he again leaves Russia, this time for six years. At the end of the same year, he prepares the complete collection of his works for publication. This date closes the last literary period of his life. For the remaining ten years, he slowly and steadily moves away from literature.

Gogol. Dead Souls. Lecturer - Dmitry Bak

In The Author's Confession, Gogol reports that Pushkin advised him to write a long novel and gave him a plot: some clever rogue is buying up serfs who have already died, but who are still alive according to the papers; then pawns them in a pawnshop and in this way acquires a large capital. Gogol began to write without a definite plan, carried away by the opportunity to travel with his hero throughout Russia, portraying many funny faces and funny phenomena.

Initially, Dead Souls seemed to him an adventure novel like Don Quixote by Cervantes or Gil Blas by Lesage. But under the influence of the spiritual change that occurred in him while working on this work, the nature of the novel gradually began to change. From an adventurous story "Dead Souls" turn into a huge poem in three volumes, into the Russian "Divine Comedy", the first part of which should correspond to "Hell", the second - to "Purgatory" and the third - to "Paradise". First - the dark phenomena of Russian life, vulgar, stupid, vicious "dead souls". Then the gradual onset of dawn: in fragments of the unfinished second volume, there are already “virtuous” faces: the ideal owner Kostanzhoglo, the ideal girl Ulenka, the wise old man Murazov, who preaches about the “improvement of spiritual property”. Finally, in the conceived but not written third volume, there is a complete triumph of light.

Gogol ardently believed in the spiritual beauty of Russia, in the moral treasures of the Russian people - and he was tormented by the reproaches of critics who claimed that he was capable of depicting only base and ugly things. How he longed to glorify his homeland. But his tragedy was that he would have been given a great satirical talent, a brilliant ability to notice everything funny and vulgar in life and a complete inability to create “ideal images” - Meanwhile, he looked at his work as a religious and public service, wanted not to entertain and amuse the reader, but to teach him and turn to God. From this internal conflict, Gogol died, never finishing his poem.

In the first volume of "Dead Souls" Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a man of very decent appearance and a notorious rogue, arrives in a provincial town, charms the governor, police chief, prosecutor and the entire provincial society, meets with the largest landowners and then visits their estates. We get acquainted with the "types" of landowners, depicted so vividly, with such vitality that their names have long become common nouns. Sweet to cloying Manilov, who gave his sons the names of Themistoclus and Alkid and touchingly whispering to his wife: “Open your mouth, darling, I’ll put this piece to you.” Cudgel-headed, stingy hostess Korobochka, mortally frightened by the fact that she cheapened dead souls. Nozdrev, a fine fellow with rosy cheeks and jet-black sideburns, a reveler, a liar, a braggart, a cheat and a brawler, always selling something, changing, buying. Sobakevich, looking like "a medium-sized bear", fisted and cunning, the fist is the owner, bargaining for pennies on every dead soul and slipping the woman "Elizaveta Sparrow" instead of a peasant to Chichikov. The miser Plyushkin, in a dressing gown resembling a woman's hood, with four floors dangling from behind, a landowner who robs his own peasants and lives in some kind of dusty junk warehouse; Chichikov himself, seized with a passion for profit, commits fraud and meanness for the sake of a dream of a rich life; his footman Petrushka, who carries around a special smell and reads for the sake of the pleasant process of reading, and the coachman Selifan, who philosophizes in a drunken state and bitterly reproaches his treacherous horses. All these figures, implausible, almost caricatured, are full of their own, terrible life.

Gogol's fantasy, which creates living people, takes little account of reality. He has a special "fantastic realism", this is not plausibility, but the complete persuasiveness and independence of artistic fiction. It would be absurd to judge Nikolaev Russia by Dead Souls. Gogol's world is governed by its own laws, and his masks seem more alive than real people.

When the author of "Dead Souls" read the first chapters of the poem to Pushkin, he first laughed, then "began to gradually become more and more gloomy, and finally became completely gloomy. When the reading was over, he said in a voice of anguish: “God, how sad is our Russia.” “It amazed me,” adds Gogol. “Pushkin, who knew Russia so well, did not notice that all this was a caricature and my own invention.”

The first volume of "Dead Souls" ends with Chichikov's hasty departure from the provincial town, thanks to Nozdryov and Korobochka, rumors spread there about his purchase of dead souls. The city is engulfed in a whirlwind of gossip. Chichikov is considered a robber, spy, captain Kopeikin and even Napoleon.

In the surviving chapters of the second volume, Chichikov's wanderings continue; new “types” appear: the fat glutton Pyotr Petrovich Petukh, the gallant warrior General Betrishchev, the lazy and dreamy “bobak” and “sky smoker” Tentetnikov. The author's humor noticeably weakens, his creative powers decrease. The artist is often overshadowed by a moralist-preacher. Dissatisfied with his work, Gogol burned the second volume before his death.

The verbal fabric of "Dead Souls" is extraordinarily complex. Gogol mocks the romantic "beauties of the style" and strives for accuracy and detailed recording of real facts. He counts all the buttons on the dress of his heroes, all the pimples on their faces. He will miss nothing - not a single gesture, not a single grimace, not a single wink or cough. In this deliberate solemnity of the depiction of trifles, in this pathos of exaltation of insignificance, there is his merciless irony. Gogol destroys his heroes with laughter: Chichikov puts on his tailcoat of "lingonberry color with a spark" - and the stigma of vulgarity is forever placed on his image. Irony and "natural painting" turn people into mannequins, forever repeating all the same mechanical gestures; life Is mortified and divided into countless senseless trifles. Truly a terrible realm of "dead souls"!

And suddenly, unexpectedly, a fresh wind flies into this musty and stuffy world. The mocking prose writer gives way to the enthusiastic poet; interrupted pedantically - a detailed description of vulgar faces and wretched things and spills a stream of inspirational lyrics. The author tenderly recalls his youth, speaks excitedly about the great appointment of the writer, and with frenzied love stretches out his hands to his homeland. Against the backdrop of cold mockery and evil satire, these lyrical ups and downs amaze with their fiery poetry.

Chichikov, in his britzka, left the city of NN, sadly and dejectedly stretched along the sides of the road “versts, stationmasters, wells, carts, gray villages with samovars, small towns, pockmarked barriers, bridges being repaired, boundless fields ...”. This enumeration is reminiscent not so much of a description of a landscape as of an inventory of some miserable junk... and suddenly Gogol turns to Russia:

"Rus! Rus! I see you, from my wonderful, beautiful far away I see you! .. Openly - deserted and even everything in you; like dots, like badges, your low cities imperceptibly stick out among the plains; nothing will seduce or charm the eye. But what incomprehensible, secret force attracts you? Why is your melancholy song heard and heard incessantly in your ears, rushing along your entire length and width, from sea to sea? What's in it, in this song? What calls and cries and grabs the heart? What sounds painfully kiss and strive to the soul, and curl around my heart? Rus! What do you want from me? What incomprehensible bond lurks between us? Why do you look like that, and why did everything that is in you turn eyes full of expectation on me? . What does this vast expanse prophesy? Is it not here, in you, that an infinite thought is born, when you yourself are without end? Is there not a hero to be here, when there is a place where to turn around and walk for him? And menacingly embraces me mighty space, with terrible power reflected in my depths; my eyes lit up with an unnatural power... wow! what a sparkling, wonderful, unfamiliar distance to the earth! Rus!.."

A great poem, a celebration of absurdity and the grotesque, from which, paradoxically, the history of Russian realism is counted. Having conceived a three-part work on the model of The Divine Comedy, Gogol managed to complete only the first volume - in which he introduced a new hero, businessman and rogue into literature, and created an immortal image of Russia as a three-bird rushing in an unknown direction.

comments: Varvara Babitskaya

What is this book about?

A retired official, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, arrives in the provincial town of N., a man devoid of distinctive features and everyone likes. Having charmed the governor, city officials and neighboring landlords, Chichikov begins to go around the latter with a mysterious goal: he buys up dead souls, that is, recently deceased serfs who have not yet been included in revision tale ⁠ and therefore formally considered alive. Having visited sequentially caricatured, each in his own way, Sobakevich, Manilov, Plyushkin, Korobochka and Nozdryov, Chichikov draws up bills of sale and prepares to complete his mysterious plan, but by the end of the first (and only completed) volume of the poem in the city of N., some kind of chthonic forces, a scandal breaks out, and Chichikov, according to Nabokov's wording, "leaves the city on the wings of one of those delightful lyrical digressions ... which the writer every time places between business meetings of the character." Thus ends the first volume of the poem, conceived by Gogol in three parts; the third volume was never written, and the second Gogol burned - today we only have access to its reconstructions based on extant fragments, and in different editions, therefore, speaking of "Dead Souls", we generally mean only their first volume, completed and published author.

Nikolay Gogol. Engraving after a portrait by Fyodor Moller, 1841

When was it written?

In the famous letter to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye dated October 7, 1835, Gogol asks the poet for a “plot for a comedy”, which was a successful precedent - the intrigue also grew, told by the poet. By this time, however, Gogol had already written three chapters of the future poem (their contents are unknown, since the manuscript has not been preserved) and, most importantly, the name "Dead Souls" was invented.

"Dead Souls" was conceived as a satirical picaresque novel, a parade of evil caricatures, - as Gogol wrote in the "Author's Confession", "if anyone saw those monsters that came out from under my pen at first for myself, he would definitely shudder." In any case, Pushkin shuddered, who listened to the author's reading of the first chapters in an early edition that has not come down to us, and exclaimed: “God, how sad our Russia!" 1 ⁠ . Thus, although later Gogol's poem acquired a reputation as an angry verdict on Russian reality, in fact we are already dealing with kind, sweet "Dead Souls".

Gradually, Gogol's idea changed: he came to the conclusion that “many of the vile things are not worth malice; it’s better to show all their insignificance ... ”, and most importantly, instead of random deformities, I decided to depict“ some of them on which our truly Russian, our fundamental properties are more noticeable and deeper, showing precisely the national character in both good and bad. Satire has become an epic, a poem in three parts. Its plan was drawn up in May 1836 in St. Petersburg; On May 1, 1836, The Inspector General premiered there, and already in June Gogol went abroad, where he spent the next 12 years with short breaks. Gogol begins the first part of his main work in the autumn of 1836 in the Swiss city of Vevey, reworking everything he started in St. Petersburg; from there he writes to Zhukovsky about his work: “All Russia will appear in it!” - and for the first time calls it a poem. The work continues in the winter of 1836/37 in Paris, where Gogol learns about the death of Pushkin - since then, in his work, the writer sees something like Pushkin's spiritual testament. Gogol reads the first chapters of the poem to fellow writers in the winter of 1839/40, during a short visit to Russia. At the beginning of 1841, an almost complete edition of Dead Souls was completed, but Gogol continued to make changes until December, when he came to Moscow to apply for publication (subsequent edits made for censorship reasons are usually not reflected in modern editions).

How is it written?

The most striking feature of Gogol is his violent imagination: all things and phenomena are presented on a grotesque scale, a random situation turns into a farce, a casually dropped word escapes in the form of a detailed image, from which a more economical writer could make a whole story. "Dead Souls" owes much of its comic effect to the naive and important narrator, who, with unflappable thoroughness, describes in great detail sheer nonsense. An example of such a technique is “a surprising in its deliberate, monumentally majestic idiocy, a conversation about wheel" 2 Adamovich G. Report on Gogol // Questions of Literature. 1990. No. 5. S. 145. ⁠ in the first chapter of the poem (this technique, which made his friends terribly amused, Gogol also used in oral improvisations). Lyrical digressions sharply contrast with this manner, where Gogol turns to poetic rhetoric, which took a lot from the holy fathers and was colored by folklore. It is believed that because of its richness, Gogol's language is "more untranslatable than any other Russian prose" 3 Svyatopolk-Mirsky D.P. The history of Russian literature from ancient times to 1925. Novosibirsk: Svinin and sons, 2006, p. 241. ⁠ .

Analyzing Gogol's absurdities and illogicalities, Mikhail Bakhtin uses the term "kokalany" (coq-à-l'âne), which literally means "from a rooster to a donkey", and in a figurative sense - verbal nonsense, which is based on a violation of stable semantic, logical, spatio-temporal connections (an example of a kokalan is “an elderberry in the garden, and an uncle in Kyiv”). Elements of the "kokalan style" - swearing and curses, feast images, laudatory and swearing nicknames, "unpublished speech spheres" - and indeed, such folk expressions as "fetyuk, haberdashery, mouse foal, jug snout, grandmother", many contemporary Gogol critics found unprintable; they were also offended by the information that “the beast Kuvshinnikov will not let down a single simple woman”, that “he calls it to use it about strawberries”; Nikolai Polevoy Nikolai Alekseevich Polevoy (1796-1846) - literary critic, publisher, writer. From 1825 to 1834 he published the Moscow Telegraph magazine, after the closure of the magazine by the authorities, Polevoy's political views became noticeably more conservative. Since 1841 he published the journal "Russian Messenger". ⁠ he complains about “Chichikov’s servant, who stinks and carries a stinking atmosphere with him everywhere; on the drop that drips from the boy's nose into the soup; on the fleas that were not combed out from the puppy... on Chichikov, who sleeps naked; to Nozdryov, who comes in a dressing gown without a shirt; on Chichikov's pinching hair from his nose. All this appears in abundance on the pages of Dead Souls - even in the most poetic passage about the trio bird, the narrator exclaims: "Damn it all!" Examples of banquet scenes are innumerable - that lunch at Sobakevich's, that Korobochka's treat, that breakfast at the governor's. It is curious that in his judgments about the artistic nature of Dead Souls, Polevoy actually anticipated Bakhtin’s theories (albeit evaluatively negatively): “If we allow coarse farces, Italian buffoonery, epic poems inside out (travesti), poems like “ Elisha" Maikov, can one not regret that the wonderful talent of Mr. Gogol is wasted on such creatures!

Goose pen, with which Gogol wrote the second volume of Dead Souls. State Historical Museum

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

What influenced her?

Gogol's work struck his contemporaries with originality - no direct pretexts were sought for him either in domestic literature or in Western literature, which Herzen noted, for example: “Gogol is completely free from foreign influence; he did not know any literature when he had already made himself name" 4 Herzen A.I. Literature and public opinion after December 14, 1825 // Russian aesthetics and criticism of the 40-50s of the XIX century / Prepared. text, comp., intro. article and note. V. K. Kantor and A. L. Ospovat. M.: Art, 1982. ⁠ . Both contemporaries and later researchers considered "Dead Souls" as an equal element of the world literary process, drawing parallels with Shakespeare, Dante, Homer; Vladimir Nabokov compared Gogol's poem with Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Joyce's Ulysses and Henry James's Portrait. Mikhail Bakhtin mentions 5 Bakhtin M. M. Rabelais and Gogol (The Art of the Word and Folk Laughter Culture) // Bakhtin M. M. Questions of Literature and Aesthetics. M.: Fiction, 1975. S. 484-495. ⁠ about the "direct and indirect (through Stern and the French natural school) influence of Rabelais on Gogol", in particular, seeing in the structure of the first volume "an interesting parallel to the fourth book of Rabelais, that is, the journey of Pantagruel."

Svyatopolk-Mirsky Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky (1890-1939) - publicist and literary critic. Before emigrating, Svyatopolk-Mirsky published a collection of poems, participated in the First World War and the Civil War on the side of the White movement. In exile since 1920; there he publishes the History of Russian Literature in English, is fond of Eurasianism and establishes the magazine Versta. In the late 1920s, Svyatopolk-Mirsky became interested in Marxism and in 1932 moved to the USSR. After returning, he signs his literary works as "D. Mirsky". In 1937 he was sent into exile, where he died. ⁠ notes in Gogol's work the influence of the tradition of Ukrainian folk and puppet theater, Cossack ballads ("dooms"), comic authors from Molière to vaudeville artists of the twenties, the novel of manners, Stern, German romantics, especially Tieck and Hoffmann (under the influence of the latter, Gogol wrote in the gymnasium the poem "Hanz Küchelgarten", which was destroyed by criticism, after which Gogol bought and burned all available copies), French romanticism, led by Hugo, Jules Janin Jules-Gabriel Janin (1804-1874) French writer and critic. For more than forty years he worked as a theater critic for the Journal des Debats. In 1858, a collection of his theatrical feuilletons was published. Janin became famous for his novel The Dead Ass and the Guillotine, which became the program text of the French frenetic school. In a letter to Vera Vyazemskaya, Pushkin calls the novel "charming" and puts Janin above Victor Hugo. ⁠ and their common teacher Maturin Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824), English writer. From the age of 23 he served as a vicar in the Irish church, he wrote his first novels under a pseudonym. He became famous thanks to the play "Bertrand", it was highly appreciated by Byron and Walter Scott. Maturin's novel Melmoth the Wanderer is considered a classic example of English Gothic literature. ⁠ , "Iliad" translated by Gnedich. But all this, the researcher concludes, "is only the details of the whole, so original that it could not be expected." Gogol's Russian predecessors are Pushkin and especially Griboyedov (in "Dead Souls" there are many indirect quotations from, for example, an abundance of off-screen characters that are useless for the plot, directly borrowed situations, vernacular, which both Griboedov and Gogol critics reproached).

The parallel of "Dead Souls" with "The Divine Comedy" by Dante is obvious, the three-part structure of which, according to the author's intention, was to be repeated by his poem. Comparison of Gogol with Homer after a fierce controversy became a commonplace already in Gogol's times, but here it is more appropriate to recall not the Iliad, but the Odyssey - a journey from chimera to chimera, at the end of which the hero is waiting, as a reward, a home; Chichikov does not have his own Penelope, but he often dreams of “a woman, a child.” "Odyssey" translated by Zhukovsky Gogol, according to the recollections of acquaintances, read them aloud, admiring every line.

The vulgarity that Chichikov personifies is one of the main distinguishing properties of the devil, in whose existence, it must be added, Gogol believed much more than in the existence of God

Not without censorship. In general, Gogol's relationship with censorship was rather ambiguous - for example, Nicholas I personally admitted to the production, on whom Gogol subsequently counted in various ways - he even asked (and received) material assistance as the first Russian writer. Nevertheless, Dead Souls had to be dealt with: “Never, perhaps, did Gogol use such an amount of worldly experience, heart knowledge, ingratiating affection and feigned anger, as in 1842, when he began printing Dead Souls, - a critic later recalled Pavel Annenkov Pavel Vasilievich Annenkov (1813-1887) - literary critic and publicist, the first biographer and researcher of Pushkin, the founder of Pushkin studies. He was friends with Belinsky, in the presence of Annenkov Belinsky wrote his actual will - "Letter to Gogol", under Gogol's dictation Annenkov rewrote "Dead Souls". The author of memoirs about the literary and political life of the 1840s and its heroes: Herzen, Stankevich, Bakunin. One of Turgenev's close friends, the writer sent all his latest works to Annenkov before publication. ⁠ .

At a meeting of the Moscow censorship committee on December 12, 1841, "Dead Souls" were entrusted to the care of the censor Ivan Snegirev Ivan Mikhailovich Snegiryov (1793-1868) - historian, art critic. From 1816 he taught Latin at Moscow University. He was a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, served as a censor for more than 30 years. Snegiryov, one of the first researchers of Russian folklore and popular prints, studied the monuments of ancient Russian architecture. Introduced the term "parsuna" into art criticism, denoting portraiture of the 16th-18th centuries in the technique of icon painting. ⁠ , who at first found the work "completely well-intentioned", but then for some reason was afraid to let the book go to print on his own and handed it over to his colleagues for consideration. Here, first of all, the name itself caused difficulties, which, according to the censors, meant godlessness (after all, the human soul is immortal) and the condemnation of serfdom (in reality, Gogol never meant either one or the other). They also feared that Chichikov's scam would set a bad example. Faced with a ban, Gogol took the manuscript from the Moscow censorship committee and sent it to St. Petersburg through Belinsky, asking Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, Vyazemsky and his good friend to intervene. Alexander Smirnov-Rosset ⁠ . Petersburg censor Nikitenko Alexander Vasilievich Nikitenko (1804-1877) - critic, editor, censor. In 1824, Nikitenko, who came from a peasant background, received his freedom; he was able to go to university and pursue an academic career. In 1833, Nikitenko began working as a censor and by the end of his life had risen to the rank of Privy Councilor. From 1839 to 1841 he was the editor of the magazine "Son of the Fatherland", from 1847 to 1848 - the magazine "Contemporary". Nikitenko's memoirs, which were published posthumously, in the late 1880s, gained fame. ⁠ reacted enthusiastically to the poem, but considered it completely impassable "The Tale of the Captain Kopeikine" 6 Russian antiquity. 1889. No. 8. S. 384-385. ⁠ . Gogol, who exclusively cherished the Tale and saw no reason to print the poem without this episode, significantly altered it, removing all dangerous places, and finally received permission. "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin" was published until the very revolution in a censored version; Of the significant censorship edits, one should also mention the title, which Nikitenko changed to The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, thus shifting the focus from political satire to a picaresque novel.

The first copies of "Dead Souls" left the printing house on May 21, 1842, two days later Gogol left for border 7 Shenrok V.I. Materials for the biography of Gogol. In 4 volumes. M., 1892-1898. ⁠ .

Title page of the first edition of the novel, 1842

Cover of Dead Souls, drawn by Gogol for the 1846 edition

How was it received?

With almost unanimous enthusiasm. In general, Gogol had a surprisingly happy fate as a writer: no other classic was so fondled by the Russian reader. With the release of the first volume of Dead Souls, the cult of Gogol finally established itself in Russian society, from Nicholas I to ordinary readers and writers of all camps.

The young Dostoevsky knew Dead Souls by heart. In the "Diary of a Writer" he tells how "he went ... to one of his former comrades; we talked all night with him about "Dead Souls" and read them, for the umpteenth time I don't remember. Then it happened between the youth; two or three will come together: “But shouldn’t we, gentlemen, read Gogol!” - sit down and read, and perhaps all night. Gogol's words came into fashion, young people cut their hair "under Gogol" and copied his vests. Music critic, art critic Vladimir Stasov recalled that the appearance of "Dead Souls" was an event of extraordinary importance for young students, the crowd read the poem aloud so as not to argue about the queue: "... We read and re-read this great, unheard of original, incomparable , national and brilliant creation. We were all drunk with delight and amazement. Hundreds and thousands of Gogol's phrases and expressions were immediately known to everyone by heart and went into the general use" 8 Stasov V. V.<Гоголь в восприятии русской молодёжи 30-40-х гг.>// N. V. Gogol in the memoirs of his contemporaries / Ed., Preface. and comment. S. I. Mashinsky. M.: State. publisher artistic lit., 1952, pp. 401-402. ⁠ .

However, regarding Gogol's words and phrases, opinions differed. Former publisher "Moscow Telegraph" Encyclopedic magazine published by Nikolai Polev from 1825 to 1834. The magazine appealed to a wide range of readers and advocated "education of the middle classes". In the 1830s, the number of subscribers reached five thousand people, a record audience for those times. The magazine was closed by personal decree of Nicholas I because of a negative review of the play by Nestor Kukolnik, which the emperor liked. ⁠ Nikolai Polevoy was offended by expressions and realities that now look completely innocent: “On every page of the book, you hear: scoundrel, swindler, bastard... all the tavern sayings, abuse, jokes, everything that you can hear enough in the conversations of lackeys, servants, cabbies ”; Gogol's language, Polevoy argued, "can be called a collection of errors against logic and grammar…” 9 Russian messenger. 1842. No. 5-6. S. 41. ⁠ I agreed with him Faddey Bulgarin Faddey Venediktovich Bulgarin (1789-1859) - critic, writer and publisher, the most odious character in the literary process of the first half of the 19th century. In his youth, Bulgarin fought in the Napoleonic detachment and even participated in the campaign against Russia; from the mid-1820s he was a supporter of Russian reactionary policy and an agent of the Third Section. Bulgarin's novel "Ivan Vyzhigin" was a great success and is considered one of the first picaresque novels in Russian literature. Bulgarin published the Severny Arkhiv magazine, the first private newspaper with a political section, Severnaya Pchela, and the first theatrical almanac, Russkaya Talia. ⁠ : “In no other Russian work is there so much bad taste, dirty pictures and evidence of complete ignorance of the Russian language as in this poem…” 10 Northern bee. 1842. No. 119. ⁠ Belinsky objected to this that although Gogol's language "is definitely wrong, often sins against grammar", but "Gogol has something that makes you not notice the carelessness of his language - there is a syllable", and pricked the prim reader, who is offended in the press by which is characteristic of him in life, not understanding "a poem based on the pathos of reality as it is." At the suggestion of Belinsky, the literary legislator of the forties, Gogol was recognized as the first Russian writer - for a long time, everything fresh and talented that grew after him in literature was automatically attributed by critics to the Gogol school.

Before the appearance of Dead Souls, Gogol's position in literature was still vague - "not a single poet in Russia had such a strange fate as Gogol: even people who knew him by heart did not dare to see a great writer in him creations" 11 Belinsky V. G. The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls. // Domestic notes. 1842. T. XXIII. No. 7. Det. VI "Bibliographic Chronicle". pp. 1-12. ⁠ ; now he has moved from the category of comic writers to the status of an undoubted classic.

Gogol became, as it were, the progenitor of all new literature and a bone of contention for literary parties that could not divide the main Russian writer among themselves. In the year the poem was published, Herzen wrote in his diary: "Talk about Dead Souls." Slavophiles and anti-Slavs split into parties. Slavophiles No. 1 say that this is the apotheosis of Russia, our Iliad, and they praise it, next, others are furious, they say that Russia is anathema here and they scold it for it. The anti-Slavs also bifurcated in reverse. Great is the dignity of a work of art when it can elude any one-sided view. Sergei Aksakov, who left extensive and extremely valuable memoirs about Gogol and prompted others to do the same immediately after the writer's death, exaggerates Gogol's closeness to the Slavophiles and is silent about Gogol's relationship with Belinsky and his camp (however, Gogol himself tried not to inform Aksakov about these relationships). Belinsky did not lag behind: “Gogol's influence on Russian literature was enormous. Not only all young talents rushed to the path indicated by him, but also some writers, who had already gained fame, went along the same path, leaving their former one. Hence the appearance of the school, which its opponents thought to humiliate with the name natural. Dostoevsky, Grigorovich, Goncharov, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin - it is difficult to remember which of the Russian writers of the second half of the 19th century Gogol did not influence.

Following the descendant of the Ethiopians Pushkin, a native of Little Russia, Gogol for a long time became the main Russian writer and prophet. The artist Alexander Ivanov depicted Gogol on the famous canvas "The Appearance of Christ to the People" in the form of a figure standing closest to Jesus. Already during the life of Gogol and soon after his death, German, Czech, English, French translations of the poem appeared.

In the 1920s and 30s, Dead Souls was adapted by Mikhail Bulgakov. In his feuilleton "The Adventures of Chichikov", the heroes of Gogol's poem ended up in Russia in the 20s and Chichikov made a dizzying career, becoming a billionaire. In the early 1930s, Bulgakov's play "Dead Souls" was successfully staged at the Moscow Art Theater; he also created a screenplay, which, however, was not used by anyone. Gogol's poem resonated in literature even more indirectly: for example, Yesenin's poem "I don't regret, I don't call, I don't cry" (1921) was written under the impression of the lyrical introduction to the sixth - Plyushkin - chapter of "Dead Souls", which the poet himself admitted (on this is hinted at by the lines "Oh, my lost freshness" and "I have now become more stingy in desires").

The names of some of Gogol's landowners became household names: Lenin accused the populists of "Manilov projecting", Mayakovsky titled a poem about the greedy layman "Plyushkin". The passage about the trinity bird has been memorized by schoolchildren for decades.

Gogol's poem was screened for the first time back in 1909 in Khanzhonkov's studio; in 1960, the film-play "Dead Souls" based on the play by Bulgakov was shot by Leonid Trauberg; in 1984, a five-episode film starring Alexander Kalyagin was directed by Mikhail Schweitzer. Of the latest interpretations, one can recall The Case of the Dead Souls directed by Pavel Lungin and the high-profile theatrical production by Kirill Serebrennikov at the Gogol Center in 2013.

Fragment of Alexander Ivanov's painting "The Appearance of Christ to the People". 1837–1857. Tretyakov Gallery. Ivanov wrote from Gogol the face of the person closest to Jesus

Was Chichikov's scam feasible in practice?

No matter how fantastic the enterprise with "dead souls" seemed, it was not only feasible, but formally did not violate the laws and even had precedents.

Deceased serfs who are registered with the landowner revision tale A document with the results of the taxable population census conducted in Russia in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. The fairy tales indicated the name, patronymic, surname, age of the owner of the yard and members of his family. A total of ten such audits were carried out. ⁠ , for the state were alive until the next census and were subject to a poll tax. Chichikov's calculation was that the landlords would only be happy to get rid of the extra dues and give him dead (but on paper alive) peasants for pennies, which he would then be able to pawn. The only hitch was that peasants could not be bought or mortgaged without land (this is perhaps an anachronism: this practice was prohibited only in 1841, and the action of the first volume of Dead Souls takes place a decade earlier), but Chichikov allowed it easy: “Why, I’ll buy on the withdrawal, on the withdrawal; Now the land in the Tauride and Kherson provinces is given away for free, just populate.

The plot of the poem, given to Gogol by Pushkin (as Gogol writes in The Author's Confession), was taken from real life. As writes Pyotr Bartenev Pyotr Ivanovich Bartenev (1829-1912) - historian, literary critic. From 1859 to 1873 he was the head of the Chertkovo Library, the first public library in Moscow. He wrote monographs on Pushkin, along with Pavel Annenkov, he is considered the founder of Pushkin studies. Since 1863 he published the historical journal "Russian Archive". As a historian, he advised Tolstoy in his work on War and Peace. ⁠ in a memoir note Vladimir Sollogub Vladimir Alexandrovich Sollogub (1813-1882) - writer. He served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published secular stories in magazines. The most famous work of Sollogub was the story "Tarantas", published in 1845. He had the title of court historiographer. Sollogub was a close friend of Pushkin: in 1836 a duel could take place between them, but the parties reconciled, Sollogub acted as Pushkin's second in the first duel with Dantes. ⁠ : “In Moscow, Pushkin was on the run with a friend. There was also a certain P. (an old dandy). Pointing to him to Pushkin, a friend told about him how he bought up dead souls for himself, pawned them and received a big profit. Pushkin liked it very much. “You could make a novel out of this,” he said casually. This was before 1828 of the year" 12 Russian archive. 1865. S. 745. ⁠ .

This could be superimposed on another plot that interested Pushkin during his stay in Chisinau. Peasants fled en masse to Bessarabia at the beginning of the 19th century. To hide from the police, runaway serfs often assumed the names of the dead. The city of Bender was especially famous for this practice, whose population was called the "immortal society": for many years there was not a single death recorded there. As the investigation showed, in Bendery it was accepted as a rule: the dead "do not be excluded from society", and their names are given to newly arrived fugitive peasants.

Alas! fat people know how to handle their affairs better in this world than thin ones

Nikolay Gogol

In general, fraudulent audit lists were not uncommon. A distant relative of Gogol, Marya Grigorievna Anisimo-Yanovskaya, was sure that the idea of ​​the poem was given to the writer by her own uncle Kharlampy Pivinsky. Having five children and yet only 200 acres A tithe is a unit of land area equal to 1.09 hectares. 200 acres make up 218 hectares. ⁠ land and 30 souls of peasants, the landowner made ends meet thanks to the distillery. Suddenly there was a rumor that only landowners with at least 50 souls would be allowed to smoke wine. Small-scale nobles began to grieve, and Kharlampy Petrovich “went to Poltava, and paid dues for his dead peasants, as if for the living. And since there weren’t enough of his own, and even with the dead, far to fifty, he took vodka in a cart, and went to neighbors and bought dead souls from them for this vodka, wrote them down for himself and, having become the owner of fifty souls on paper, until his death he smoked wine and gave this theme to Gogol, who visited Fedunki, Pivinsky's estate, 17 versts from Yanovshchina Another name for the Gogol estate is Vasilievka. ⁠ ; besides, the whole Mirgorod region knew about dead souls Pivinsky" 13 Russian antiquity. 1902. No. 1. S. 85-86. ⁠ .

Another local anecdote recalls a schoolmate of Gogol: “In Nizhyn ... there was a certain K-ach, a Serb; of enormous growth, very handsome, with the longest mustaches, a terrible explorer - somewhere he bought the land on which he is located - it is said in the deed of sale - 650 souls; the amount of land is not indicated, but the boundaries are definitive. ... What happened? This land was a neglected cemetery. This same case told 14 literary heritage. T. 58. M.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1952. S. 774. ⁠ Gogol abroad Prince N. G. Repnin Nikolai Grigorievich Repnin-Volkonsky (1778-1845) - military man. Participated in the battle of Austerlitz, after which he was captured - Napoleon I sent Repnin to Alexander I with a proposal to enter into negotiations. During the War of 1812 he commanded a cavalry division. He was the governor-general of Saxony and Little Russia. Since 1828, a member of the State Council. Due to accusations of misappropriation of public money, he resigned. ⁠ »

Probably, Gogol listened to this story in response to a request to provide him with information about various “incidents” “that could happen when buying dead souls”, with which he pestered all his relatives and friends - perhaps this story was echoed in the second volume of the poem in General Betrishchev’s remark: “To give you dead souls? Yes, for such an invention, I give them to you with land, with housing! Take over the whole cemetery!”

Despite the thorough research carried out by the writer, inconsistencies remained in Chichikov's plan, which Sergei pointed out to Gogol after the release of the poem. Aksakov 15 Correspondence of N. V. Gogol. In 2 volumes. T. 2. M .: Khudozh. literature, 1988. S. 23-24. ⁠ : “I scold myself very much that I overlooked one thing, and insisted on the other a little: the peasants are sold with their families for withdrawal, and Chichikov refused the female; without a power of attorney issued in a government office, it is impossible to sell foreign peasants, and the chairman cannot be at the same time both a trustee and someone present in this case. The short-sighted Chichikov did not buy women and children, apparently simply because their nominal price was lower than for men.

Pyotr Boklevsky. Chichikov. Illustration for "Dead Souls". 1895

Why is "Dead Souls" a poem?

Calling his main work a poem, Gogol, first of all, had in mind that this is not a story and not a novel in the understanding of his time. Such an unusual genre definition is clarified by Gogol's sketches for the unrealized "Educational Book of Literature for Russian Youth", where Gogol, analyzing different types of literature, "the greatest, most complete, huge and versatile of all creatures" calls an epic that can cover an entire historical era, the life of a nation or even of all mankind, - as an example of such an epic, Gogol cites the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he loved in the translations of Gnedich and Zhukovsky, respectively. At the same time, the novel, as we would intuitively call "Dead Souls" today, "is an essay too conventional", the main thing in it is intrigue: all events in it must directly relate to the fate of the protagonist, the author cannot "move the characters of the novel quickly and in multitude, in the form of passing phenomena”; the novel "does not take a lifetime, but a wonderful event in life" - and after all, Gogol's goal was precisely to create a kind of Russian cosmos.

Konstantin Aksakov immediately declared Gogol a Russian Homer in the press, provoking Belinsky's ridicule, which in reality was not entirely fair. Many of Gogol's tricks, which confused critics, become clear precisely in the Homeric context: for example, the lyrical digression, for which the narrator leaves Chichikov on the road in order to return to him just as suddenly, or detailed comparisons that parody - in Nabokov's words - Homer's branching parallels. Gentlemen in black tailcoats at a party at the governor's, scurrying around the ladies, Gogol compares with a swarm of flies - and from this comparison a whole lively picture grows: a portrait of an old housekeeper who chop sugar on a summer day. In the same way, comparing Sobakevich's face with a gourd gourd, Gogol recalls that balalaikas are made from such pumpkins - and out of nowhere the image of a balalaika player grows up in front of us, "a blinker and a dandy, and winking and whistling at white-breasted and white-necked girls" and absolutely no role not playing in the plot of the poem.

In the same epic piggy bank - sudden and inappropriate enumerations of names and details that are not related to the action: Chichikov, wanting to entertain the governor's daughter, tells her pleasant things that "he had already happened to say in similar cases in different places, namely: in the Simbirsk province at Sofron's Ivanovich Bespechny, where his daughter Adelaide Sofronovna was then with her three sisters-in-law: Marya Gavrilovna, Alexandra Gavrilovna and Adelgeida Gavrilovna; at Fedor Fedorovich Perekroev in the Ryazan province; at Frol Vasilyevich Pobedonosny in the Penza province and at his brother Pyotr Vasilyevich, where his sister-in-law Katerina Mikhailovna and her great-sisters Roza Fedorovna and Emilia Fedorovna were; in the Vyatka province with Pyotr Varsonofyevich, where his daughter-in-law's sister Pelageya Yegorovna was with her niece Sofya Rostislavna and two half-sisters - Sofia Alexandrovna and Maklatura Alexandrovna "- than not the Homeric list of ships.

In addition, the genre definition of "Dead Souls" refers to the work of Dante, which is called the "Divine Comedy", but is a poem. The three-part structure of the Divine Comedy was supposedly to be repeated by Dead Souls, but only Hell was completed.

Revision tale of 1859 for the village of Novoye Kataevo, Orenburg province

Map of Kherson province. 1843

Why is Chichikov mistaken for Napoleon?

Officials of the city of N. are anxiously discussing the similarity of Chichikov with Napoleon, having discovered that the most charming Pavel Ivanovich turned out to be some kind of sinister rogue: Chichikov. Such a suspicion - along with the maker of forged banknotes, an official of the Governor-General's Office (that is, in fact, an auditor), a noble robber "like Rinalda Rinaldina Robber hero from Christian August Vulpius' novel Rinaldo Rinaldini, published in 1797. ⁠ ”- looks like ordinary Gogol absurdism, but it did not appear in the poem by chance.

Also in the "Old World Landowners" someone "told that the Frenchman secretly agreed with the Englishman to release Bonaparte again into Russia." Such talk may have been fueled by rumors of the "hundred days," that is, of Napoleon's escape from the island of Elba and his second brief reign in France in 1815. This, by the way, is the only place in the poem where the time of the Dead Souls action is specified: “However, it must be remembered that all this happened shortly after the glorious expulsion of the French. At this time, all our landowners, officials, merchants, inmates and every literate and even illiterate people became, at least for eight whole years, sworn politicians. Thus, Chichikov travels through the Russian hinterland in the early 1820s (he is older than both Onegin and Pechorin in years), or rather, probably in 1820 or 1821, since Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, after which the possibility of suspecting him in Chichikovo naturally disappeared.

The signs of the times also include some indirect signs, such as the postmaster's favorite "Lancaster School of Mutual Education" A peer-to-peer learning system in which older students teach younger ones. Invented in Great Britain in 1791 by Joseph Lancaster. The Russian "Society of Schools for Mutual Education" was founded in 1819. Many members of the secret societies were champions of the Lancastrian system; Thus, in 1820, the Decembrist V.F. Raevsky was under investigation for “harmful propaganda among the soldiers” precisely in connection with his teaching activities. ⁠ , which Griboyedov mentions in Woe from Wit as a characteristic hobby of the Decembrist circle.

Bonaparte, who suddenly appeared incognito in a provincial Russian city, is a common folklore motif from the time of the Napoleonic Wars. In the Old Notebook, Pyotr Vyazemsky cites an anecdote about Alexei Mikhailovich Pushkin (the poet’s second cousin and a great wit), who served in the police service under Prince Yuri Dolgoruky during the war of 1806-1807: “At the post station of one of the remote provinces, he noticed in the room the caretaker's portrait of Napoleon, pasted to the wall. "Why are you keeping this scoundrel at your place?" “And then, Your Excellency,” he answers, “if it’s not equal, Bonaparte, under a false name or with a fake traveller, will arrive at my station, I will immediately recognize him, my dear, by his portrait, I will seize him, tie him up, and present him to the authorities.” "Oh, that's different!" Pushkin said.

"Oh, you're such a muzzle!" Chichikov (Alexander Kalyagin)

Or maybe Chichikov is a devil?

“I call the devil directly the devil, I don’t give him a magnificent costume at all à la Byron and I know that he goes to tailcoat" 16 Aksakov S. T. Collected works in 5 volumes. T. 3. M.: Pravda, 1966. S. 291-292. ⁠ , - Gogol wrote to Sergei Aksakov from Frankfurt in 1844. This idea was developed in the article “Gogol and the Devil” by Dmitry Merezhkovsky: “The main strength of the devil is the ability to seem not what he is.<...>Gogol was the first to see the devil without a mask, he saw his true face, terrible not for its extraordinaryness, but for its commonness, vulgarity; the first to understand that the face of the devil is not distant, alien, strange, fantastic, but the closest, familiar, generally real “human ... almost our own face in those moments when we do not dare to be ourselves and agree to be “like everyone else”.

In this light, the sparks on Chichikov's lingonberry tailcoat shine ominously (Chichikov, as we remember, generally kept “brown and reddish colors with a spark” in his clothes; in the second volume, the merchant sells him a cloth shade of “Navarin smoke with flames”).

Pavel Ivanovich is devoid of distinctive features: he is “not handsome, but not bad-looking, neither too fat nor too thin; one cannot say that he is old, but not so much that he is too young ”and at the same time, like a real tempter, he charms everyone, speaking his language with everyone: he is sentimental with Manilov, he is businesslike with Sobakevich, he is simply rude with Korobochka, he knows how to support any conversation: “Whether it was about a horse factory, he also talked about a horse factory ... whether they interpreted it with regard to the investigation carried out by the Treasury, he showed that he was not unknown to judicial tricks; whether there was an argument about the billiard game - and in the billiart game he did not miss; whether they talked about virtue, and he talked about virtue very well, even with tears in his eyes. Chichikov buys human souls not only in a business sense, but also in a figurative one - for everyone he becomes a mirror, which captivates.

In a lyrical digression, the author directly asks the reader: “And which of you ... in moments of solitary conversations with yourself will deepen this heavy request into the inside of your own soul:“ Is there any part of Chichikov in me too? Yes, no matter how!” - whereas in a neighbor everyone is immediately ready to recognize Chichikov.

Is there anything else needed? Maybe you're used to, my father, for someone to scratch your heels at night. My dead man couldn't fall asleep without it

Nikolay Gogol

And looking into this mirror, the inspector of the medical board turns pale, thinking that under dead souls of course, the sick who died in the infirmaries, because he did not take the necessary measures; the chairman turns pale, having acted as attorney in the deal with Plyushkin contrary to the law; officials turn pale, covering up the recent murder of merchants: “All of a sudden they found in themselves such sins that they didn’t even exist.”

Chichikov himself constantly admires himself in the mirror, pats himself on the chin and comments approvingly: “Oh, you, such a muzzle!” - but the reader will never meet a description of his face, with the exception of an apophatic one, although other heroes of the poem are described in great detail. He does not seem to be reflected in the mirrors - like evil spirits in popular beliefs. In the figure of Chichikov, that famous Gogol devilry is concentrated, on which “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” are built and which is present in Dead Souls, although not so clearly, but undoubtedly. Mikhail Bakhtin discovers in the basis of Dead Souls “forms of a merry (carnival) walk through the underworld, through the land of death.<…>Not without reason, of course, the afterlife moment is present in the very concept and title of Gogol's novel ("Dead Souls"). The world of "Dead Souls" is the world of a cheerful underworld.<...>We will find in it the scum, and the junk of the carnival "hell", and a number of images that are the implementation of swear words. metaphors" 17 Bakhtin M. M. Rabelais and Gogol (The Art of the Word and Folk Laughter Culture) // Bakhtin M. M. Issues of Literature and Aesthetics: Studies of Different Years. M.: Artist. lit., 1975. S. 484-495. ⁠ .

In this context, Chichikov is a carnival, farcical devil, insignificant, comical and opposed to the sublime romantic evil that is often found in Gogol's contemporary literature ("the spirit of denial, the spirit of doubt" - Pushkin's demon - appears in Gogol in the form of a pleasant lady in all respects, who " was somewhat materialistic, inclined to denial and doubt, and rejected quite a lot in life”).

This cheerful demonism notes 18 ⁠ researcher Elena Smirnova, thickens by the end of the first volume in the picture of a “rebellious” city, where evil spirits, alarmed by Chichikov, climbed out of all corners: “... And everything that was, rose. Like a whirlwind, hitherto, it seemed, the dormant city shot up! Crawled out of the holes all the tyuryuki and bobaki ...<…>Some Sysoy Pafnutevich and Makdonald Karlovich appeared, whom they had never heard of; in the drawing-rooms stuck up some long, tall man with a shot through his hand, of such a tall stature that he had not even been seen. Covered droshkys, unknown rulers, rattles, wheel whistles appeared on the streets - and porridge was brewed.

Manilov (Yuri Bogatyrev)

Pyotr Boklevsky. Manilov. Illustration for "Dead Souls". 1895

Pyotr Boklevsky. Box. Illustration for "Dead Souls". 1895

Why is the narrator in Dead Souls so afraid of ladies?

As soon as the narrator touches on the ladies in his reasoning, horror attacks him: “The ladies of the city of N. were ... no, I can’t in any way; timidity is felt for sure. What was most remarkable about the ladies of the city of N. ... It’s even strange, the pen does not rise at all, as if some kind of lead was sitting in it.

These assurances should not be taken at face value - after all, right there we find such, for example, a bold description: “Everything was invented and provided for with extraordinary prudence; neck, shoulders were open just as much as necessary, and no further; each bared her possessions until she felt, by her own conviction, that they were capable of destroying a person; everything else was hidden with extraordinary taste: either some light tie made of ribbon or a scarf lighter than a cake, known as a kiss, ethereally hugged and wrapped around the neck, or small jagged walls made of thin cambric, known under the name of modesty. These modesty hid in front and behind that which could no longer cause death to a person, but meanwhile they made me suspect that it was precisely there that the very death was.

Nevertheless, the narrator has fears, and not groundless. The literary critic Elena Smirnova noticed that the conversation between “a lady pleasant in every respect” and “a lady simply pleasant” in “Dead Souls” repeats close to the text the twittering of the princesses with Natalya Dmitrievna Gorich in the third act “Woe from Wit” (“ 1st princess: What a beautiful style! 2nd princess: What folds! 1st princess: Fringed. Natalya Dmitrievna: No, if you could see my satin tulle... "- etc.) and plays the same constructive role in action 19 Smirnova E. A. Gogol's poem "Dead Souls". L.: Nauka, 1987. ⁠ .

In both cases, from the discussion of fashion, "eyes and paws", the ladies go directly to gossip and, having risen in a "general rebellion" (in Griboyedov) or heading "each in their own direction to rebel the city" (in Gogol), they start a rumor that destroyed the life of the main hero: in one case about madness, in the other - about the insidious plan to take away the governor's daughter. In the ladies of the city of N. Gogol partly portrayed the matriarchal terror of Famus Moscow.

We do not know what will happen in the other two parts of the poem; but still in the foreground are people who abuse their positions and profit from illegal means

Konstantin Masalsky

A striking exception is the governor's daughter. In general, this is the only character in the first volume of the poem that the narrator frankly admires - her face, similar to a fresh egg, and thin ears, glowing with warm sunlight. She produces an unusual effect on Chichikov: for the first time he is confused, captivated, forgets about profit and the need to please everyone and, “turning into a poet”, argues that your Rousseau: “She is now like a child, everything in her is simple: she will say that she he will, he will laugh, where he wants to laugh.

This bright and completely silent female image was to be incarnated in the second volume of Dead Souls in a positive ideal - Ulinka. We know Gogol's attitude towards women from his "Selected passages from correspondence with friends", where he published under the title "Woman in the Light" variations on his real letters to Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova (maiden name - Rosset; 1809-1882) - maid of honor of the imperial court. She became a lady-in-waiting to Empress Maria Feodorovna in 1826. In 1832 she married an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nikolai Smirnov. She was friends with Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Odoevsky, Lermontov and Gogol. ⁠ , which is often called the "hidden love" of Gogol, who has not been seen in love affairs all his life. The ideal woman, worked out by Gogol from his youth under the influence of German romantics, is ethereal, almost silent and obviously inactive - she "revives" a society infected with "moral fatigue", by her mere presence and her beauty, which not without reason strikes even the most hardened souls: "If already one senseless whim of a beauty has been the cause of world upheavals and forced the most intelligent people to do stupid things, what would happen if this whim were comprehended and directed to good? (As we can see, women's power is ambivalent here too: the governor's daughter "could be a miracle, or it might turn out to be rubbish.")

Answering the question, "what should a young, educated, beautiful, wealthy, moral and still not satisfied with her secular uselessness of a woman do", notices 20 Terts A. (Sinyavsky A.D.) In the shadow of Gogol // Collected. op. in 2 vols. T. 2. M.: Start, 1992. S. 20. ⁠ Abram Tertz, Gogol "does not call her either to cut frogs, or to abolish the corset, or even to bear children, or to refrain from childbearing." “Gogol does not require anything from her, except for what she already has as a woman - neither moralizing, nor social activities. Her good task is to be herself, showing everyone her beauty" 21 Terts A. (Sinyavsky A.D.) In the shadow of Gogol // Collected. op. in 2 vols. T. 2. M.: Start, 1992. S. 3-336. ⁠ . It is understandable why “Woman in the Light” is ridiculed by the vivisector of frogs, Turgenev’s Bazarov, who wavered in his nihilism under the influence of love: “... I feel very dirty, as if I had read Gogol’s letters to the Kaluga governor’s wife” (the wife of the Kaluga governor was just Alexandra Smirnova) .

The governor’s daughter, who “only turned white and came out transparent and bright from a muddy and opaque crowd,” is not in vain the only bright character in the poem: she is the reincarnation of Beatrice, who must lead the hero out of the Dante hell of the first volume, and this transformation inspires awe in the author.

Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Who is really meant by dead souls?

Despite the fact that this phrase has a direct meaning - dead serfs, who were called "souls" (just as a herd of horses is counted by "heads"), the figurative meaning is also clearly read in the novel - people who are dead in a spiritual sense. Announcing the future positive heroes of his poem, “a husband endowed with divine valor, or a wonderful Russian girl, which cannot be found anywhere in the world, with all the wondrous beauty of the female soul,” the author adds: “All the virtuous people of other tribes will appear dead before them, as dead book before the living word! Nevertheless, contemporaries were inclined to oppose these living, Russian and popular ideals not to foreigners, but to officials and landlords, reading this as a socio-political satire.

Gogol describes an anecdotal discussion of the poem in the censorship committee in a letter to Pletnev in 1842: “As soon as Golokhvastov, who took the place of president, heard the name “Dead Souls”, he shouted in the voice of an ancient Roman: “No, I will never allow this: the soul is immortal; there can be no dead soul, the author is arming himself against immortality. Finally, the smart president could understand that it was about Revizh souls. As soon as he got the idea ... there was even more confusion. “No,” shouted the chairman, followed by half of the censors, “this can’t even be allowed, even if there was nothing in the manuscript, and only one word stood: Revizh soul, this can’t be allowed, it means against serfdom.” A somewhat limited interpretation of Golokhvastov, it should be noted, was shared by many admirers of Gogol. Herzen turned out to be somewhat more perceptive, who saw in the poem not so much social caricatures as a gloomy insight about the human soul: “This title itself carries something terrifying in itself. And otherwise he could not name; not revizsky - dead souls, but all these Nozdryovs, Manilovs and tutti quanti - these are dead souls, and we meet them at every step.<…>Don't we all, after our youth, one way or another, lead one of the lives of Gogol's heroes? Herzen assumes that Lensky in "Eugene Onegin" would have turned into Manilov over the years if its author had not been "shot" in time, and laments that Chichikov is "one active person ... and that limited rogue" did not meet on his way a "moral landowner good-hearted, old-timer”- this is exactly what was supposed to happen, according to Gogol’s plan, in the second volume of Dead Souls.

The unfortunate fate of the second volume, which Gogol tortured for ten years and burned twice, may be partly due to the fact that Gogol could not find satisfactory "living souls" in the very reality, the ugly sides of which he showed in the first volume (where he describes his landowners , in fact, not without sympathy). Sobakevich, Manilov and Nozdryov, he opposes not the Russian people, as was commonly believed in Soviet literary criticism, but some epic or fairy-tale heroes. The most poetic descriptions of Russian peasants in the poem refer to the peasants of Sobakevich, whom he paints as alive in order to fill the price (and after him Chichikov embarks on a fantasy of Russian prowess): “Yes, of course, the dead,” said Sobakevich, as if coming to his senses and remembering that they were in fact already dead, and then he added: “However, even then to say: which of these people who are now considered living? What are these people? flies, not people.

Nozdrev (Vitaly Shapovalov)

Pyotr Boklevsky. Nozdryov. Illustration for "Dead Souls". 1895

Why are there so many different foods in Gogol's poem?

First of all, Gogol himself was very fond of eating and regaling others.

Sergey Aksakov recalls, for example, with what artistic rapture Gogol cooked pasta for his friends with his own hands: “Standing on his feet in front of the bowl, he rolled up the cuffs and with haste, and at the same time with accuracy, first put a lot of butter and began to mix the pasta with two sauce spoons, then he added salt, then pepper, and finally cheese, and continued to stir for a long time. It was impossible to look at Gogol without laughter and surprise. Another memoirist, Mikhail Maksimovich Mikhail Alexandrovich Maksimovich (1804-1873) - historian, botanist, philologist. Since 1824 he was director of the Botanical Garden of Moscow University, headed the Department of Botany. Since 1834 he was appointed the first rector of the Imperial University of St. Vladimir in Kyiv, but left the post a year later. In 1858 he was secretary of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. He collected Ukrainian folk songs, studied the history of ancient Russian literature. He corresponded with Gogol. ⁠ , recalls: “At the stations he bought milk, skimmed cream and very skillfully made butter out of them with a wooden spoon. In this occupation he found as much pleasure as in picking flowers.

Mikhail Bakhtin, analyzing the Rabelaisian nature of Gogol's work, notes about "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka": "Food, drink and sex life in these stories are of a festive, carnival-Shrovetide character." A hint of this folklore layer can also be seen in the feast scenes of Dead Souls. Korobochka, wanting to appease Chichikov, puts various pies and pies on the table, of which Chichikov pays the main attention to pancakes, dipping them three at a time into melted butter and praising them. Pancakes on Maslenitsa are appeased by carolers, personifying evil spirits, and Chichikov, who arrived “God knows where, and even at night” and buys up the dead, in the eyes of the ingenuous “mother landowner” looks like evil spirits.

Food serves to characterize the landlords, as well as their wives, villages and furnishings, and it is often behind the food in Gogol's caricatures that sympathetic human features appear. Treating Chichikov with "mushrooms, pies, quick thinkers Fried eggs baked with bread and ham. ⁠ , shanishki A diminutive form of the word "shangi" - round pies, a traditional dish of Russian cuisine. In Gogol's notebook - "a kind of cheesecake, a little less." However, shangi, unlike cheesecakes, is not made sweet. ⁠ , bucklers "Dumplings, pancakes" (from Gogol's notebook). ⁠ , pancakes, flat cakes with all sorts of seasonings: seasoning with onion, seasoning with poppy seeds, seasoning with cottage cheese, seasoning with shots Smeltok is a small lake fish. ⁠ ”, The box reminds the unconditionally sweet author Pulcheria Ivanovna from “Old World Landowners” with her shortbreads with bacon, salted mushrooms, various dried fish, dumplings with berries and pies - with poppy seeds, with cheese or with cabbage and buckwheat porridge (“these are those that Afanasy Ivanovich loves very much. And in general, she is a good housewife, she takes care of the peasants, she cordially spreads feather beds to a suspicious night guest and offers to scratch her heels.

Sobakevich, who in one sitting kills a side of lamb or a whole sturgeon, but he won’t take a frog or an oyster (the food of “Germans and French”) into his mouth, “at least sprinkle it with sugar”, reminds at this moment an epic Russian hero like Dobrynya Nikitich, who drank at once " a glass of green wine in one and a half buckets, ”it was not without reason that his late father used to go after a bear alone; the Russian bear is not at all a pejorative definition in Gogol's world.

Nozdryov was in some respects a historical person. Not a single meeting he attended was without a story. Some kind of story was bound to happen: either the gendarmes will lead him by the arms from the gendarme hall, or they will be forced to push out their own friends

Nikolay Gogol

Manilov, who built himself a “temple of solitary contemplation” and saying “You” to the coachman, offers Chichikov “simply, according to Russian custom, cabbage soup, but from the bottom of my heart” - an attribute of a rural idyll among happy villagers. Manilovka and its inhabitants are a parody of the literature of sentimentalism. In Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol writes: “Karamzin’s imitators served as a pitiful caricature of himself and brought both the style and thoughts to sugar cloying,” Manilov, as we recall, was not without pleasantness, however, “in this the pleasantness seemed too much transferred to the sugar. Dinner in Manilovka, as usual, is not described in detail - but we know that Manilov and his wife now and then brought each other “either a piece of an apple, or a candy, or a nut, and spoke in a touchingly tender voice expressing perfect love:“ Open up, darling , my mouth, I will put this piece for you, ”thus showing, although grotesque, but the only example of conjugal love in the entire poem.

Only from Nozdryov Chichikov leaves hungry - his dishes are burnt or undercooked, made by the cook from anything: “whether there was pepper near him - he poured pepper, whether cabbage was caught - he popped cabbage, stuffed milk, ham, peas, in a word, go ahead »; on the other hand, Nozdryov drinks a lot - and also some kind of utter rubbish: Madeira, which the merchants "mercilessly filled with rum, and sometimes poured aqua regia into it", some kind of "Bourgognon and champagne together", rowanberry, in which "fusel was heard in all its strength."

Finally, Plyushkin, the only tragic figure in Dead Souls whose story of transformation is told to us by the author, thereby inevitably arousing sympathy, does not eat or drink at all. His treat - a carefully preserved rusk from an Easter cake brought by his daughter - is a rather transparent metaphor for the future resurrection. In Selected Places, Gogol wrote: “Call ... to a beautiful, but dormant person. ... To save his poor soul ... he insensibly puts on flesh and has already become all flesh, and there is almost no soul in him.<…>Oh, if you could tell him what my Plyushkin must say if I get to the third volume of Dead Souls!

Gogol did not have to describe this revival: there is a tragic paradox in that in the last days Gogol fasted cruelly, as it is believed, having starved himself to death, renouncing food and laughter - that is, turning himself into Plyushkin in some spiritual sense.

Roasted piglet. 19th century engraving

Chichikov (Alexander Kalyagin)

Why did Gogol decide to make his hero a scoundrel?

The author himself motivated his choice as follows: “They turned a virtuous person into a workhorse, and there is no writer who would not ride him, urging him with a whip and everything that came across ... they exhausted a virtuous person to the point that now there is not even a shadow of virtue on him, and only the ribs and skin instead of the body remained ... they hypocritically call for a virtuous person ... they do not respect a virtuous person. No, it's time to finally hide the scoundrel."

For Chichikov alone, there are no particular meannesses, hardly anyone suffered from his scams (except indirectly - the prosecutor died of fright). Nabokov calls him "a vulgar vulgar caliber", while noting: "Trying to buy the dead in a country where they legally bought and mortgaged living people, Chichikov hardly seriously sinned from the point of view of morality."

For all the caricature vulgarity of Chichikov, he is, after all, the Russian who loves fast driving, in an apologetic passage about the troika. It was he who had to go through the crucible of trials and be spiritually reborn in the third volume.

The prerequisite for such a revival is the only property that distinguishes Chichikov from all other heroes of Dead Souls: he is active. Worldly failures do not extinguish the energy in him, “activity did not die in his head; there everything wanted to build something and was only waiting for the plan. In this regard, he is the same Russian man who “went ... even to Kamchatka, give only warm mittens, he pats his hands, an ax in his hands, and went to cut himself a new hut.”

Of course, his activity is so far only acquisitive, and not creative, in which the author sees his main vice. Nevertheless, it is precisely and only Chichikov’s energy that moves the action from a place - from the movement of his trinity bird “everything flies: miles fly, merchants fly towards them on the rays of their wagons, a forest flies on both sides with dark formations of firs and pines”, all of Russia rushes somewhere.

The whole city is like this: a scammer sits on a scammer and drives a scammer. All Christ sellers. There is only one decent person there - the prosecutor, and even that, to tell the truth, is a pig

Nikolay Gogol

All Russian classics dreamed of an energetic, active Russian hero, but, it seems, they did not really believe in his existence. Mother Russian laziness, who was born before us, was perceived by them as the source of all evils and sorrows - but at the same time as the basis of the national character. An example of a good owner, immersed in vigorous activity, Gogol displays in the second volume of "Dead Souls", it is no coincidence that he endows him with the unpronounceable and obviously foreign (Greek) surname Kostanjoglo: "A Russian person ... cannot do without an urge ... So he will doze off, and he will turn sour." The next famous businessman in Russian literature, described by Goncharov in Oblomov, is the semi-German Andrey Stolz, while the undoubtedly more handsome Oblomov is the direct heir of Gogol’s “lump, couch potato, boba” Tentetnikov, who in his youth hatched plans for a vigorous housekeeping, and then settled in a dressing gown on the sofa. Complaining about Russian laziness, both Gogol and his followers, it seems, did not believe in the possibility of its eradication without the participation of businesslike foreigners - but contrary to reason, they could not overcome the feeling that businesslikeness is an unspiritual, vulgar and vile property. The word "mean" in the archaic sense meant - of a low kind (after all, the origin of Chichikov is "dark and modest"). Ilya Ilyich Oblomov formulated this antithesis most expressively in his apology for laziness, where he opposes himself, a Russian master, to “another” - a low, uneducated person, whom “necessity tosses from corner to corner, he runs day and day” (“There are a lot of Germans sort of,” Zakhar said sullenly.

This situation changed only with the advent of raznochintsev heroes in literature, who could not afford to lie flat. It is characteristic that in the famous production of "Dead Souls" in the "Gogol Center" in 2013, Chichikov was played by the American Odin Byron, and the final poetic monologue about the trinity bird was replaced by a perplexed question: "Rus, what do you want from me?" Explaining this choice, director Kirill Serebrennikov interprets the conflict of "Dead Souls" as a clash between "a man from the new world", industrial and rational, with "the Russian hardened local way of life." Long before Serebrennikov, Abram Tertz expressed a similar thought: “Gogol, as a magic wand, brought Russia - not Chatsky, not Lavretsky, not Ivan Susanin, and not even the elder Zosima, but Chichikov. This will not give out! Chichikov, only Chichikov is able to move and take out the cart of history, - Gogol foresaw at a time when there was still no dream of any development of capitalism in Russia ... let me down!..” 22 Terts A. (Sinyavsky A.D.) In the shadow of Gogol // Collected. op. in 2 vols. T. 2. M.: Start, 1992. S. 23. ⁠

Performance "Dead Souls". Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. Gogol Center, 2014

Performance "Dead Souls". Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. Gogol Center, 2014

Did Gogol portray himself in Dead Souls?

In Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol describes his work as a way of spiritual improvement, a kind of psychotherapy: “I have already got rid of many of my nasty things by passing them on to my heroes, ridiculing them in them and making others also laugh at them.”

When reading "Dead Souls" it may seem that the author was too strict with himself. The features with which he endowed his characters look rather touching, in any case, it is they who give the heroes humanity - but it must be borne in mind that Gogol considered any habit, excessive attachment to the material world to be a weakness. And he had many such weaknesses. At the end of Chapter VII of "Dead Souls" for a moment one of the many seemingly completely random, but incredibly alive minor characters is shown - a Ryazan lieutenant, "a big, apparently, hunter for boots", who has already ordered four pairs and could not lie down. to sleep, constantly trying on the fifth: “the boots, for sure, were well-tailored, and for a long time he raised his leg and examined the smartly and marvelously stitched heel.” Lev Arnoldi (half-brother of Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, who knew Gogol briefly) assures in his memoirs that this passionate hunter of boots was Gogol himself: there were always three boots, often even four pairs, and they were never worn out.

Another example is given (also from Arnoldi’s memoirs) by Abram Tertz: “Gogol in his youth had a passion for acquiring unnecessary things - all kinds of inkwells, vases, paperweights: later it separated and developed into Chichikov’s hoarding, removed forever from the author’s home property” ( this observation is confirmed by many memoirists: partly in the form of self-improvement, partly for the practical reason that Gogol spent most of his life on the road and all his property fit in one chest, the writer at some point renounced mischief Addiction to collecting things, receiving gifts, bribes. From a Christian point of view, it is a sin. ⁠ and all the graceful little things dear to his heart he passed on to friends).

Gogol was generally a big dandy with extravagant taste. In particular, Chichikov’s “woolen, rainbow-colored headscarf,” which the narrator, according to his statement, never wore, was just his own - Sergey Aksakov recalls how he saw the writer at work in Zhukovsky’s house in a striking outfit: “Instead of boots, long woolen Russian stockings above the knees; instead of a frock coat, over a flannel doublet, a velvet spencer; the neck is wrapped in a large multi-colored scarf, and on the head is a velvet, crimson, embroidered with gold kokoshnik, very similar to the headdress of muzzles.

"BUT! paid, paid!" cried the man. He also added a noun to the word patched, very successful, but not commonly used in secular conversation, and therefore we will skip it.<...>The Russian people express themselves strongly!

Nikolay Gogol

The habit of the governor of the city of N., who, as you know, was “a great kind man and even sometimes embroidered on tulle himself,” is also an autobiographical trait: as Pavel Annenkov recalled, Gogol had a passion for needlework and “with the approach of summer ... he began to cut out for himself neck shawls made of muslin and cambric, let the vests go a few lines lower, etc., and dealt with this matter very seriously ”; he loved to knit, cut dresses for his sisters.

Gogol allowed not only himself, but also those around him, however, even before, when working on Dead Souls, he set out to depict his own vices in the form of “monsters”. Finding a comic detail or situation in the surrounding life, he brought it to the grotesque, which made Gogol the inventor of Russian humor. Vladimir Nabokov mentions, say, Gogol's mother, "an absurd provincial lady who irritated her friends with the assertion that steam locomotives, steamboats and other innovations were invented by her son Nikolai (and she drove her son into a frenzy, delicately hinting that he was the writer of every just read a vulgar romance with her),” one cannot help but recall Khlestakov: “However, there are many of my works: “The Marriage of Figaro”, “Robert the Devil”, “Norma”.<…>All this that was under the name of Baron Brambeus ... I wrote all this ”(and, as you know, Gogol himself was“ with Pushkin on a friendly footing ”).

Expressions like “to call on Sopikov and Khrapovitsky, meaning all sorts of dead dreams on the side, on the back and in all other positions,” which cut the ears of critics in Dead Souls, Gogol, according to evidence, used in life.

The main thing, probably, was what he conveyed to Chichikov - a nomadic lifestyle and a love of fast driving. As the writer admitted in a letter to Zhukovsky: “The only time I felt good was when I was on the road. The road always saved me when I sat up for a long time on the spot or fell into the hands of doctors, because of their cowardice, who always harmed me, not knowing a single hair of my nature.

Arriving from Little Russia in St. Petersburg in December 1828 with the intention of serving, he went abroad six months later, and from then until the end of his life he traveled almost continuously. At the same time, in Rome, and in Paris, and in Vienna, and in Frankfurt, Gogol wrote exclusively about Russia, which, as he believed, was visible in its entirety only from afar (one exception is the story "Rome"). Diseases forced him to go to the waters in Baden-Baden, Karlsbad, Marienbad, Ostend for treatment; at the end of his life he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Russia, Gogol did not have his own home - he lived for a long time with friends (most of all - with Stepan Shevyrev and Mikhail Pogodin), but rather unceremoniously resettled his sisters by friends, taking them from the institute. The Gogol House Museum on Nikitsky Boulevard in Moscow is the former mansion of Count Alexander Tolstoy, where Gogol lived his last four years, burned the second volume of Dead Souls and died.

The story, satirically directed against the highest Petersburg administration, became the main and only obstacle to the publication of Dead Souls. Probably, foreseeing this, even before the manuscript was handed over to censorship, Gogol himself significantly edited the first edition of the story, throwing out the finale, which tells about the adventures of Kopeikin, who robbed with a whole army of "runaway soldiers" in the Ryazan forests (but "all this, in fact, so to speak, it is aimed at only the state ”; Kopeikin robbed only the state, without touching private people, thereby resembling a national avenger), and then fled to America, from where he writes a letter to the sovereign and seeks royal mercy for his comrades so that his story does not repeated. The second edition of the story, which is now considered normative, ends only with a hint that Captain Kopeikin became the chieftain of a gang of robbers.

But even in the softened version, the censor Alexander Nikitenko called "Kopeikin" "completely impossible to skip," which plunged the writer into despair. “This is one of the best places in the poem, and without it there is a hole that I can’t pay and sew up with anything,” Gogol wrote to Pletnev on April 10, 1842. I would rather change it than lose it altogether. I threw out all the generals, the character of Kopeikin meant more, so now it is clear that he himself is the cause of everything and that he was treated well. Instead of a hero who suffered for his homeland and brought to complete despair by the neglect of the authorities, Kopeikin now turned out to be a red tape and a rogue with immoderate claims: “I can’t, he says, get by somehow. I need, he says, to eat a cutlet, a bottle of French wine, to entertain myself too, in the theater, you understand.

Neither in the corridors, nor in the rooms, their eyes were struck by cleanliness. They didn't care about her back then; and what was dirty remained dirty, not taking on an attractive appearance

Nikolay Gogol

The story does not seem to relate to the development of the plot in any way and looks like an inserted short story in it. However, the author cherished this episode so much that he was not ready to print the poem without it and preferred to mutilate the story, throwing out all politically sensitive places from it - obviously, satire was not the main thing in Kopeikin.

According to Yuri Mann, one of the artistic functions of the story is "the interruption of the" provincial "plan by the Petersburg, capital ones, the inclusion in the plot of the poem of the higher metropolitan spheres of Russian life" 23 Mann Yu. V. Gogol's Poetics, 2nd ed., add. M.: Fiction, 1988. S. 285. ⁠ . The researcher interprets Kopeikin as a "little man" rebelling against the repressive and soulless state machine - this interpretation was legitimized in Soviet literary criticism, but it was brilliantly refuted by Yuri Lotman, who showed that the meaning of the story is generally different.

Noting the choice of Gogol, who made his Kopeikin not a soldier, but a captain and an officer, Lotman explains: “An army captain is a rank of the 9th class, which gave the right to hereditary nobility and, consequently, to soul ownership. The choice of such a hero to play the role of a positive character of the natural school is strange for a writer with such a heightened "sense of rank" as Gogol was. In Kopeikin, the philologist sees a reduced version of the literary "noble robbers"; according to Lotman, it was this story that Pushkin gave to Gogol, who was fascinated by the image of a robber-nobleman, dedicated his “Dubrovsky” to him and intended to use it in the unwritten novel “Russian Pelam”.

The main character himself is also endowed with parody features of a romantic robber in Dead Souls: he breaks into Korobochka at night, “like Rinald Rinaldina”, he is suspected of kidnapping a girl, like Kopeikin, he deceives not individuals, but only the treasury - a direct Robin Hood . But Chichikov, as we know, has many faces, he is a round void, an average figure; therefore, he is surrounded by “literary projections, each of which is “both parodic and serious” and highlights one or another important ideology for the author, to which Dead Souls refers or polemics: Sobakevich came out as if from an epic, Manilov - from sentimentalism , Plyushkin is the reincarnation of a miserly knight. Kopeikin is a tribute to the romantic, Byronic tradition, which is of paramount importance in the poem; this "literary projection" was indeed indispensable. In the romantic tradition, it was on the side of the hero - the villain and outcast - that the sympathies of the author and the reader were; his demonism is from disappointment with society, he is charming against the background of vulgarities, he is always left with the possibility of redemption and salvation (usually under the influence of female love). Gogol, on the other hand, approaches the question of moral rebirth from a different, not romantic, but Christian side. Gogol's parodic comparisons - Kopeikin, Napoleon or the Antichrist - remove the halo of nobility from evil, make it ridiculous, vulgar and insignificant, that is, absolutely hopeless, "and it is precisely in its hopelessness that the possibility of an equally complete and absolute rebirth lurks."

The poem was conceived as a trilogy, the first part of which was supposed to make the reader horrified by showing all the Russian abominations, the second - to give hope, and the third - to show a picture of rebirth. Already on November 28, 1836, in the same letter Mikhail Pogodin Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin (1800-1875) - historian, prose writer, publisher of the Moskvityanin magazine. Pogodin was born into a peasant family, and by the middle of the 19th century he had become such an influential figure that he gave advice to Emperor Nicholas I. Pogodin was considered the center of literary Moscow, he published the almanac Urania, in which he published poems by Pushkin, Baratynsky, Vyazemsky, Tyutchev, in his "Moskvityanin" was published by Gogol, Zhukovsky, Ostrovsky. The publisher shared the views of the Slavophiles, developed the ideas of pan-Slavism, and was close to the philosophical circle of philosophers. Pogodin professionally studied the history of Ancient Russia, defended the concept according to which the foundations of Russian statehood were laid by the Scandinavians. He collected a valuable collection of ancient Russian documents, which was later bought by the state. ⁠ , in which Gogol reports on the work on the first volume of "Dead Souls" - a thing in which "all Russia will respond" - he explains that the poem will be "in several volumes." One can imagine what a high standard Gogol set for himself, if the first and only published volume of the poem began to seem insignificant to him over time, like “a porch hastily attached by the provincial architect to the palace, which was planned to be built on a colossal scale.” Having promised himself and his readers to describe nothing less than the whole of Russia and give a recipe for saving the soul, announcing a “husband gifted with valor” and a “wonderful Russian girl”, Gogol drove himself into a trap. The second volume was eagerly awaited, moreover, Gogol himself mentioned it so often that a rumor spread among his friends that the book was ready. Pogodin even announced its release in Moskvityanin in 1841, for which he received from Gogol reprimand From French - reproach, reprimand. ⁠ .

In the meantime, the work didn't go on. Throughout 1843-1845, the writer continuously complains in letters to Aksakov, Zhukovsky, Yazykov about a creative crisis, which is then further exacerbated by a mysterious illness - Gogol is afraid of "the blues, which can intensify an even more painful state" and sadly admits: "I tortured myself, raped to write, suffered severe suffering, seeing his impotence, and several times already caused himself illness by such coercion and could not do anything, and everything came out by force and bad" 24 Selected passages from correspondence with friends // Complete works of NV Gogol. 2nd ed. T. 3. M., 1867. ⁠ . Gogol is ashamed to return to his homeland, as "a man sent on business and returning empty-handed," and in 1845 for the first time burned the second volume of "Dead Souls", the fruit of five years of labor. In "Selected Places ..." in 1846, he explains: "It is necessary to take into account not the pleasure of some lovers of arts and literature, but all readers," and the latter, according to the reader, would be harmed rather than benefited. , a few striking examples of virtue (in contrast to the cartoons from the first volume), if you do not immediately show them, "as clear as day", the universal path of moral perfection. By this time, Gogol considers art only a stepping stone to preaching.

Neck, shoulders were open just as much as necessary, and no further; each bared her possessions until she felt, by her own conviction, that they were capable of destroying a person; everything else was tucked away with extraordinary taste

Nikolay Gogol

Such a sermon was "Selected Places", which greatly damaged Gogol's reputation in the liberal camp as an apology for serfdom and an example of church hypocrisy. Friends-correspondents by the time the "Selected Places" was published were already (despite the real cult of Gogol) annoyed by his real letters, in which Gogol lectured them and literally dictated the daily routine. Sergei Aksakov wrote to him: “I am fifty-three years old. I then read Thomas a Kempis Thomas a Kempis (c. 1379 - 1471) - writer, Catholic monk. The probable author of the anonymous theological treatise "On the Imitation of Christ", which became the program text of the New Piety spiritual movement. The treatise criticizes the outward piety of Christians and praises self-denial as a way of becoming like Christ. ⁠ before you were born.<…>I do not condemn any, anyone's convictions, if only they were sincere; but, of course, I won’t accept anyone’s… And suddenly you imprison me, like a boy, for reading Thomas of Kempis, by force, without knowing my convictions, but how else? at the agreed time, after coffee, and dividing the reading of the chapter, as if into lessons ... Both funny and annoying ... "

All of this mental evolution took place in parallel with and in connection with a mental illness very similar in description to what until recently was called manic-depressive psychosis, and today is more accurately called bipolar disorder. Throughout his life, Gogol suffered from mood swings - periods of seething creative energy, when the writer created both bright and unusually funny things and, according to the recollections of friends, started dancing in the middle of the street, were replaced by black stripes. Gogol experienced the first such attack in Rome in 1840: “The sun, the sky - everything is unpleasant for me. My poor soul: she has no shelter here. I am now more fit for a monastery than for secular life. The very next year, the spleen is replaced by ecstatic energy (“I am deeply happy, I know and hear wondrous moments, a wonderful creation is happening and taking place in my soul”) and immoderate self-conceit, characteristic of a state of hypomania (“Oh, believe my words. from now on, my word"). A year later, Gogol’s description recognizes chronic depression with its characteristic apathy, intellectual decline and a sense of isolation: “I was seized by my ordinary (already ordinary) periodic illness, during which I remain almost immobile in a room, sometimes for 2-3 weeks. . My head is stiff. The last bonds that bind me to the light have been severed."

In 1848, Gogol, who was becoming more and more religious, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but this did not bring him relief; after that, he became the spiritual child of Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, who called for fierce asceticism and inspired the writer with thoughts about the sinfulness of all his creative work. labor 25 Svyatopolk-Mirsky D.P. The history of Russian literature from ancient times to 1925. Novosibirsk: Svinin and sons, 2006, p. 239. ⁠ . Apparently, under his influence, aggravated by a creative crisis and depression, on February 24, 1852, Gogol burned the almost finished second volume of Dead Souls in the stove. Ten days later, falling into black melancholy, Gogol died, apparently having starved himself to death under the guise of fasting.

The text of the second volume of the poem, available to us now, is not Gogol's work, but a reconstruction based on the autographs of five chapters found after Gogol's death by Stepan Shevyryov (and existing in two editions), separate passages and sketches. In print, the second volume of "Dead Souls" first appeared in 1855 as an addition to the second collected works ("The works of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, found after his death. The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls. Poem by N. V. Gogol. Volume Two (5 chapters). Moscow. In the University Printing House, 1855").

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All bibliography

Belarusian State University

Faculty of Philology

Department of Theory of Literary Studies

Holistic analysis of the work

"Dead Souls" N.V. Gogol

1st year student

Departments of Slavic Philology

(Polish and Russian philology)

Svistunov Vadim Alexandrovich

Teacher:

Morozova T.A.

Minsk - 2006

In the poem "Dead Souls", the author raised the most painful and topical issues of his contemporary life. He clearly showed the decomposition of the serfdom, the doom of its representatives. The very name of the poem had a huge revealing power, carried “something terrifying” in itself.

As conceived by N.V. Gogol, the theme of the poem was to be all of contemporary Russia. With the conflict of Dead Souls, the writer took two types of contradictions inherent in Russian society in the first half of the 19th century: between the imaginary content and the actual insignificance of the ruling strata of society and between the spiritual forces of the people and their enslavers.

The problems in the poem are two-dimensional - national and socio-cultural. The national problem lies in the depiction of Gogol's attitude towards Russia at that time. The question arises - where is Russia going - which the author reveals bilaterally. On the one hand - dead Russia, with its landowners and provincial officials of all ranks, on the other - the "Russia of the Chichikovs" that is coming to replace it. Sociocultural issues are expressed by the author's emphasis on the features of everyday culture and life in various characters of the poem. Immediately, the idea of ​​the poem is closely connected with the problem: the writer is concerned about the question of a person, about the meaning and purpose of him in life. It also shows all the lack of rights, all the obscurity and vulgarity of the interests of both the provincial society and the landowners.

Undoubtedly, in the poem "Dead Souls" there is a satirical pathos. In my opinion, in relation to the landowners, and Chichikov himself, one can apply such a definition as invective. Indeed, by satirically denouncing, for example, in Plyushkin all his bad sides, the object of ridicule becomes so pathetic that it no longer causes laughter.

In order to fully convey all the wretchedness and omission of the landowners, N.V. Gogol very skillfully uses various artistic details, primarily external ones. Consider one of the artistic details - a portrait - on the example of various landowners. Nozdryov - portrait description: “He was of medium height, a very well-built fellow with full ruddy cheeks, snow-white teeth and jet-black sideburns. He was fresh as blood and milk; health seemed to spurt from his face. The portrait is also revealed with the help of a description of Nozdryov's demeanor and nature: “Nozdryov's face, it is true, is already somewhat familiar to the reader. Everyone had to meet a lot of such people. They are called broken fellows, they are known even in childhood and at school for good comrades, and for all this they are very painfully beaten. Something open, direct, daring is always visible in their faces. They soon get to know each other, and before you have time to look back, “you” are already telling you. Friendship will start, it seems, forever: but it almost always happens that the one who makes friends will fight with them that same evening at a friendly feast. They are always talkers, revelers, reckless people, a prominent people. Sobakevich - portrait-comparison: “When Chichikov looked askance at Sobakevich, this time he seemed to him very similar to a medium-sized bear. To complete the resemblance, the tailcoat on him was completely bearish in color, the sleeves were long, the pantaloons were long, he stepped with his feet and at random and stepped incessantly on other people's legs.

The landscape occupies a significant place among Gogol's artistic details. So the descriptive landscape is visible in Manilov: “The village of Manilovka could hardly lure with its location. The master's house stood alone in the south, that is, on a hill, open to all the winds that it might take a fancy to blow; the slope of the mountain on which he stood was dressed in trimmed turf. Two or three flowerbeds with lilac bushes and yellow acacias were scattered on it in the English style; five or six birches in small clusters here and there raised small-leaved thin peaks. ”The psychological landscape can also be seen if we recall the weather that was when Chichikov Korobochka visited - it was night and it was pouring very heavy rain. It is also characteristic that Chichikov was going to go to Sobakevich, but got lost and ended up with Korobochka. All this did not bode well for Chichikov - it was Korobochka who later told about his strange transactions.

However, a significant place among the artistic details, along with the portrait, is occupied by the world of things. Gogol discovered an almost new function in the use of material details. But still I will designate this function as psychological. Thus, with the help of things, Plyushkin's features are revealed: “It seemed as if the floors were being washed in the house and all the furniture was piled up here for a while. On one table there was even a broken chair, and next to it was a clock with a stopped pendulum, to which a spider had already attached a web. Right there, leaning sideways against the wall, was a cupboard filled with antique silver, decanters, and Chinese china. On the bureau, lined with mother-of-pearl mosaics, which had already fallen out in places and left behind only yellowish grooves filled with glue, lay a lot of all sorts of things: a pile of small papers covered with a greenish marble press with an egg on top, some old book bound in leather with red cut, a lemon, all dried up, not more than a hazelnut, a broken off armchair, a glass with some liquid and three flies, covered with a letter, a piece of sealing wax, a piece of a rag raised somewhere, two feathers stained with ink, dried up, as in consumption, a toothpick, completely yellowed, with which the owner, perhaps, picked his teeth even before the French invasion of Moscow.

Abstract chronotope of the poem. Gogol through the unnamed city N shows the whole of Russia.

The heroes of the poem are vividly characterized by their own speech. So Nozdrev has a very large vocabulary of different language environments. French barbarisms are found in his speech: “bezeshki”, “clicot-matradura”, “burdashka”, “scandalous”; jargon: “banchishka”, “galbik”, “password”, “break the bank”, “play doublet”; professionalism of dog breeding: "face", "barreled ribs", "breasty"; and a lot of vulgarisms: “svintus”, “scoundrel”, “you’ll get the hell of a bald man”, “fetyuk”, “beast”, “you are such a cattle breeder”, “zhidomor”, “scoundrel”, “death do not like such thaws”. Also in the work there are archaisms: “key-keeper”, “master”, “coachman”; and historicisms: "eighteen". Manilov’s speech is very rich in various tropes that serve to give speech sublimity, courtesy and courtesy: “observe delicacy in your actions”, “magnetism of the soul”, “name day of the heart”, “I do not have a high art of expressing myself”, “the chance brought me happiness” , "what grief I have not tasted."

The composition of the poem is distinguished by clarity and clarity: all parts are interconnected by the plot-forming hero Chichikov, who travels with the goal of getting "a million. In the first chapter, exposition, introductory, the author gives a general description of the provincial provincial town and introduces readers to the main characters of the poem.
The next five chapters (the plot and development of the action) are devoted to depicting landowners in their own family and everyday life in their estates. and his relationship with Chichikov. In this way, Gogol draws a whole gallery of landlords, in their totality recreating the general picture of serf society.

The culmination of the poem is the exposure of Chichikov, first by Nozdrev, and then by Korobochka. And the denouement falls on the flight of Chichikov from the city.
A significant place in the poem "Dead Souls" is occupied by lyrical digressions and inserted episodes, which is typical for the poem as a literary genre. In them, Gogol deals with the most pressing Russian social issues. The author's thoughts about the high purpose of man, about the fate of the Motherland and the people are contrasted here with the gloomy pictures of Russian life.

The insert episode is "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin". The story of the heroic defender of the Fatherland, who became a victim of trampled justice, as if crowns the whole terrible picture of the local bureaucratic police Russia, painted in Dead Souls. The embodiment of arbitrariness and injustice is not only the provincial government, but also the metropolitan bureaucracy, the government itself. Through the mouth of the minister, the government renounces the defenders of the Fatherland, from true patriots, and, thereby, it exposes its anti-national essence - this is the thought in Gogol's work.

In the poem, the plot coincides with the plot. content conflict.

The system of characters was made on the principle of ever deeper spiritual impoverishment and moral decline from hero to hero. So, Manilov's economy "was somehow going by itself."

His estate is the front facade of landlord Russia. Pretensions to sophistication emphasize the emptiness of the inhabitants of the estate. A lonely house, rare lilac bushes, gray huts make a depressing impression. In the rooms next to expensive furniture there are armchairs covered with matting. But the owner does not understand, does not see the decline of his economy. By nature, Manilov is courteous, polite, but all this took on ridiculous forms with him. Sweetness, sentimentality are the essence of his character. Even Manilov's speech is too vague: "some sort of science," "that guy." He has done no good to anyone and lives on trifles. He does not know life, reality is replaced by empty fantasies. So, Manilov is a "so-so, neither this nor that" person.

Korobochka is “one of those mothers, small landowners, who cry for crop failures and losses, and meanwhile gain a little money in bags ...” She does not indulge in dreams, like the previous image, she is prudent and busy only with accumulation and her household. Captured by a thirst for profit, she trades in everything: bacon, hemp, serfs. People for her are just animated goods. She is not even surprised at Chichikov's strange offer, but she is afraid to sell too cheap: "They are worth it somehow ... they are somehow worth more," she goes to the city to find out the price. Chichikov, and the author along with him, calls her "club-headed".

In Nozdryov, Gogol emphasizes aimless activity: "... he suggested that you go anywhere, even to the ends of the world, enter into whatever enterprise you want, change whatever you want." But since his undertakings are devoid of purpose, Nozdryov does not bring anything to the end. In his scattered estate, only the kennel is in excellent condition: among dogs, he is "like a father among a family." He completely calmly deceives, he has no moral principles. The peasants create all the benefits with their labor and save the landowner from worries. Nozdryov is accustomed to getting what he wants, and if someone resists, he becomes dangerous: "Not a single meeting where he was was without history." He behaves cheekily, rudely. Gogol ironically calls the hero a "historical man." Similar to a bear, Sobakevich has all the appropriate habits. There was no soul in his body at all. The furniture in the house also resembles the owner himself. So Gogol achieves brightness and expressiveness in describing the characteristic features of the hero. He always cares only about his own benefit, and his main goal is to fill his stomach. Sobakevich is "economical", smart and practical: he does not ruin the peasants, since it is unprofitable for him. He treats everyone with his own label: a rogue and a swindler. Sobakevich knows that everything in the world is for sale, and declares to Chichikov: "If you please, I'm ready to sell." The protagonist concludes: "No, whoever is a fist cannot straighten into a palm." The theme of moral decline, spiritual death reaches its climax in the chapter on Plyushkin. The estate strikes dilapidation, devastation. It seems that life has left this village: “The log in the huts was dark and old; many roofs were see-through like a sieve…” Gogol emphasizes the spirit of death: “it was impossible to say that a living creature lived in this room…” The owner himself locked himself from the outside world in your castle. Like a housekeeper, Plyushkin is a slave of things, but not a master. Because of his passion, he cannot distinguish useful things from rubbish: grain and flour perish, but moldy cake and tincture are stored. And once Plyushkin "was only a thrifty owner." The thirst for enrichment at the expense of the peasants turned him into a miser.

In the process of depicting landowners and officials, the image of the main character of the story, Chichikov, gradually unfolds before readers. Only in the final, eleventh chapter, Gogol reveals his life in all details and finally exposes his hero as a clever bourgeois predator, a swindler, a civilized scoundrel.

Through the entire poem, Gogol, parallel to the storylines of the landowners, officials and Chichikov, continuously draws another one - connected with the image of the people. With the composition of the poem, the writer all the time persistently reminds of the presence of an abyss of alienation between the common people and the ruling classes.

What everyone should know about the immortal work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol

Text: Sergey Volkov, Evgenia Vovchenko
Photo: artists Lesha Frey/metronews.ru and Mikhail Kheifets/plakat-msh

"Dead Souls" by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was read by everyone. Whether entirely or not is another question. In the meantime, Chichikov's adventures are an obligatory part of the school curriculum, and schoolchildren patiently seek out lyrical digressions, carefully analyze the life of landowners with such telling surnames: Korobochka, Manilov, Nozdrev, they are trying to delve into the meaning of the now catchphrase “Rus, where are you rushing to? Give an answer…".
But how many re-read Gogol after school? Are you ready to return to this mysterious work and look at it with your adult eyes, and not with the eyes of a school teacher who is usually taken at his word. But sometimes you really want to show off your erudition among friends, showing yourself to be an educated and well-read person. Just for such people, the project “Yes to reading” was invented, where in a few hours of intensive lectures you can fill in your gaps in the literature. The lecturer of the project, a teacher of Russian language and literature, offers his own set of facts that everyone needs to know about the immortal "Dead Souls".

10 facts about "Dead Souls"

1.

2.

It is believed that the plot of the work was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. Most likely, he grew out of Pletnev about his imminent marriage and about his dowry, formed after the pledge of 200 souls.

3.

The first volume was written abroad. As noted, “It’s scary to say that you not only love your country more from afar, but you see it better and understand it better. Remember that our great genius

Systematized summary of the poem "Dead Souls" by N.V. Gogol should start with the fact that this is a work of the famous Ukrainian writer N.V. Gogol, which the author himself called a poem. It was conceived in the form of three volumes, but the author almost completely destroyed the second volume, refuting the saying "manuscripts do not burn." Thus, only a couple of chapters in rough notes survive from the second volume. The third volume was only in Gogol's ideas and there is extremely little information about him. Before you is a summary of Gogol - "Dead Souls".

The plot of the first volume

Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a former official, and now a schemer, posing as a landowner, arrives in the provincial town of N. Chichikov's first task is to gain confidence in local high-ranking residents. And with this task the swindler deftly copes. Pavel Ivanovich quickly becomes a welcome guest at dinner parties and balls, gaining the trust of others. Chichikov's main goal is to buy up "dead souls", that is, dead peasants, who are still listed as living people on paper, and re-register them as living ones. What for? Everything is simple. Then the "peasants" can be remortgaged and get good money. Why is this for Chichikov, an intelligent and resourceful person? The fact is that the main character has a dream: to become rich. Once he served in the customs, where he went bankrupt, providing smugglers with the opportunity to transport goods for money. Chichikov quarreled with an accomplice and he handed him over to the authorities. In order not to go to jail, he escapes, taking with him a couple of papers, shirts, soap. He was unable to withdraw money from his bank account. However, like any big but fragile business, Chichikov's scam could not bear unaccounted for trifles. on the way of the swindler was the gossip and rake the landowner Nozdrev. Gulyaka hurried to tell the whole city of N about Chichikov's deeds, while adding to everything the kidnapping of the daughter of the governor himself. Pavel Ivanovich instantly got his bearings and left the hospitable city, taking the purchased bills of sale with him. Gogol did not begin to sum up at the end of the first part. Instead, he addresses the reader with a philosophical question: "Isn't he a scoundrel?" Accordingly, each reader gets the opportunity to think about his own soul for a moment, because Chichikov's qualities are in many.

Some heroes of Gogol's "Dead Souls"

It is better not to know the personalities described in this book in absentia. The author was able to do the impossible: he breathed life into. Nevertheless, Gogol's summary of "Dead Souls" cannot do without the characteristics of some of the characters. Since any person is made by the environment, let's take another look at Chichikov and his retinue.

Chichikov Pavel Ivanovich In addition to the details described above, one can note his dapperness and ability to look good even on a long journey. Selifan is Chichikov's short, rude coachman. A connoisseur of the characters of horses and a connoisseur of thoroughbred, tall girls. Petrushka is Chichikov's nosy and lipped footman, a lover of wine and tavern fun. He does not like to wash and smells fragrant with the aromas of an unwashed body in worn clothes from a master's shoulder. Braggart.

Let us include in our summary of Gogol's "Dead Souls" and the inhabitants of the city N, because it was they who helped the author to force Chichikov to demonstrate all his talents. Governor, governor's wife and their daughter; vice governor; police chief; chairman of the chamber; prosecutor; postmaster; the couple of landowners Manilovs with their sons Themistoclus and Alkid; Korobochka Nastasya Petrovna; landowner Nozdrev; landowner Mizhuev; the Sobakevich couple; landowner Stepan Plyushkin; uncles Mityai and Minyay; a pleasant lady in all respects and just a pleasant lady.

Some details of the second volume

Summary of Gogol's "Dead Souls" in the second volume becomes even shorter. The reason is the fragmentary nature of the information and drafts left after the author destroyed the manuscript. The optimal way out is to sketch the second volume in selected faces. Tentetnikov Andrey Ivanovich, or in other words Derpennikov, is a kind of prototype of Oblomov: he slowly wakes up and walks in a dressing gown, rarely receives guests and leaves the house a little. The character is strange. pushes for enmity with almost everyone around. Well-read, educated, ambitious. He once served in the capital, but having quarreled with the boss, he returned to the estate, where he tried to change the life of his own peasants. They, however, did not understand him. Sometimes he draws and tries to write a scientific work.

Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. The years have not changed the rogue, rather, they have strengthened his talents to ingratiate himself and communicate pleasantly on any topic. He did not leave speculation with "dead souls", but at this time most of the landowners re-laid the papers, so that Chichikov was left with no lot. He bought an estate, and at the end of the second part he gets caught in a scam, for which he almost disappeared in prisons. In the course of the poem, he does a good deed: reconciles Tentetnikov and Betrishchev, which contributes to the wedding of the first with the general's daughter.

Betrishchev. Landowner, general, neighbor of Tentetnikov. A kind of Roman patrician: mustachioed, important and stately. Petty tyrant. He has a kind heart and a habit of making fun of others.

Ulinka. The same daughter of the general, who became the wife of Tentetnikov in the course of the poem. Lively, active, noble and very beautiful. Although little is known about the character of the girl, Gogol's affection for her is noticeable, and she became the heroine of the third volume, which says a lot. And many others.

You can go on, but why? The main points have already been described. We can only advise you to read the entire poem written by N.V. Gogol. "Dead Souls", a summary of which was presented in the article, does not contain a description of the third volume, since it was not written, so one can only assume. There is evidence that Tentetnikov and his wife end up in Siberia, most likely into exile. Chichikov turns out to be in the same region. Everything else is rumors and lies, having little real facts under them.