In what year was the poem Dead Souls written? The history of the creation of the novel "Dead Souls" Year of publication of dead souls.

The poem Dead Souls was conceived by Gogol as a grandiose panorama of Russian society with all its peculiarities and paradoxes. The central problem of the work is spiritual death and the rebirth of representatives of the main Russian estates of that time. The author denounces and ridicules the vices of the landowners, venality and pernicious passions of the bureaucracy.

The title of the work itself has a twofold meaning. "Dead Souls" are not only deceased peasants, but also other actually living characters of the work. Calling them dead, Gogol emphasizes their devastated, pitiful, "dead" souls.

History of creation

Dead Souls is a poem to which Gogol devoted a significant part of his life. The author repeatedly changed the concept, rewrote and altered the work. Initially, Gogol conceived Dead Souls as a humorous novel. However, in the end he decided to create a work that exposes the problems of Russian society and will serve its spiritual revival. This is how POEM "Dead Souls" appeared.

Gogol wanted to create three volumes of the work. In the first, the author planned to describe the vices and decay of the serf society of that time. In the second, give your heroes hope for redemption and rebirth. And in the third, he intended to describe the further path of Russia and its society.

However, Gogol managed to finish only the first volume, which appeared in print in 1842. Until his death, Nikolai Vasilievich worked on the second volume. However, just before his death, the author burned the manuscript of the second volume.

The third volume of Dead Souls was never written. Gogol could not find an answer to the question of what will happen next with Russia. Or maybe he just didn’t have time to write about it.

Analysis

Description of the work, plot

Once, in the city of NN, a very interesting character appeared, which stands out strongly against the background of other old residents of the city - Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. After his arrival, he began to actively get acquainted with the important persons of the city, attended feasts and dinners. A week later, the visitor was already on "you" with all the representatives of the city nobility. Everyone was delighted with the new man who suddenly appeared in the city.

Pavel Ivanovich goes out of town to pay visits to noble landowners: Manilov, Korobochka, Sobakevich, Nozdrev and Plyushkin. With every landowner, he is kind, trying to find an approach to everyone. Natural resourcefulness and resourcefulness help Chichikov to get the favor of every landowner. In addition to empty talk, Chichikov talks with the gentlemen about the peasants who died after the revision ("dead souls") and expresses a desire to buy them. The landlords cannot understand why Chichikov needs such a deal. However, they agree to it.

As a result of his visits, Chichikov acquired more than 400 "dead souls" and was in a hurry to finish things faster and leave the city. Useful acquaintances made by Chichikov upon arrival in the city helped him to settle all the issues with the documents.

After a while the landowner Korobochka let slip in the city that Chichikov was buying up "dead souls". The whole city learned about Chichikov's affairs and was perplexed. Why would such a respected gentleman buy dead peasants? Endless rumors and speculations have a detrimental effect even on the prosecutor, and he dies from fear.

The poem ends with Chichikov hastily leaving the city. Leaving the city, Chichikov sadly recalls his plans to buy dead souls and pledge them to the treasury as living.

main characters

A qualitatively new hero in Russian literature of that time. Chichikov can be called a representative of the newest, newly emerging class in serf Russia - entrepreneurs, "acquirers". The activity and activity of the hero distinguishes him favorably against the background of other characters in the poem.

The image of Chichikov is distinguished by its incredible versatility, versatility. Even by the appearance of the hero, it is difficult to immediately understand what a person is and what he is. "In the chaise sat a gentleman who was not handsome, but not bad-looking, neither too fat, nor too thin, it cannot be said that he was old, but not so that he was too young."

It is difficult to understand and grasp the nature of the protagonist. He is changeable, multifaceted, able to adapt to any interlocutor, to give his face the desired expression. Thanks to these qualities, Chichikov easily finds a common language with landowners, officials and gains the necessary position in society. Chichikov uses the ability to charm and win over the right people to achieve his goal, namely the receipt and accumulation of money. His father also taught Pavel Ivanovich to deal with those who are richer and take care of money, since only money can pave the way in life.

Chichikov did not earn money honestly: he deceived people, took bribes. Over time, Chichikov's machinations are gaining in scope. Pavel Ivanovich seeks to increase his condition by any means, not paying attention to any moral norms and principles.

Gogol defines Chichikov as a man with a mean nature and also considers his soul to be dead.

In his poem, Gogol describes typical images of landowners of that time: "business executives" (Sobakevich, Korobochka), as well as not serious and wasteful gentlemen (Manilov, Nozdrev).

Nikolai Vasilievich masterfully created the image of the landowner Manilov in the work. By this image alone, Gogol meant a whole class of landowners with similar features. The main qualities of these people are sentimentality, constant fantasies and lack of vigorous activity. The landlords of such a warehouse let the economy take its course, do not do anything useful. They are stupid and empty inside. This was exactly what Manilov was - not bad at heart, but a mediocre and stupid poser.

Nastasya Petrovna Korobochka

The landowner, however, differs significantly in character from Manilov. Korobochka is a good and tidy mistress; everything in the estate is going well with her. However, the landowner's life revolves exclusively around her economy. The box does not develop spiritually, is not interested in anything. She does not understand absolutely nothing that does not concern her economy. The box is also one of the images by which Gogol meant a whole class of such limited landowners who do not see anything beyond their household.

The author unequivocally classifies the landowner Nozdryov as a non-serious and wasteful gentleman. Unlike sentimental Manilov, energy boils in Nozdryov. However, the landowner uses this energy not for the good of the economy, but for the sake of his momentary pleasures. Nozdryov is playing, wasting money. Differs in its frivolity and idle attitude to life.

Mikhail Semenovich Sobakevich

The image of Sobakevich, created by Gogol, echoes the image of a bear. There is something of a large wild beast in the appearance of the landowner: sluggishness, gravity, strength. Sobakevich is concerned not with the aesthetic beauty of the things around him, but with their reliability and durability. Behind a rude appearance and a stern character hides a cunning, intelligent and resourceful person. According to the author of the poem, it will not be difficult for landowners like Sobakevich to adapt to the upcoming changes and reforms in Russia.

The most unusual representative of the landlord class in Gogol's poem. The old man is distinguished by his extreme stinginess. Moreover, Plyushkin is greedy not only in relation to his peasants, but also in relation to himself. However, this kind of economy makes Plyushkin a truly poor person. After all, it is his stinginess that does not allow him to find a family.

Bureaucracy

Gogol has a description of several city officials in his work. However, the author in his work does not significantly differentiate them from each other. All officials in Dead Souls are a gang of thieves, crooks and embezzlers. These people really only care about their own enrichment. Gogol literally describes in a few lines the image of a typical official of that time, rewarding him with the most unflattering qualities.

Quotes

“Eh, Russian people! Doesn't like to die a natural death! " Chichikov

"Do not have money, have good people to convert," said one wise man ... " Chichikov

“... more than anything, take care and save a penny: this thing is the safest thing in the world. A comrade or friend will cheat you and in trouble will be the first to betray you, but a penny will not betray you, no matter what kind of trouble you are " Chichikov's father

"... how deeply it has sunk into the Slavic nature that has slipped only in the nature of other peoples ..."Gogol

The main idea, the meaning of the work

The plot of Dead Souls is based on an adventure conceived by Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. At first glance, Chichikov's plan seems incredible. However, if you look at it, the Russian reality of those times, with its rules and laws, provided opportunities for all sorts of machinations associated with serfs.

The fact is that after 1718, a capitation census of peasants was introduced in the Russian Empire. The master had to pay tax for every male serf. However, the census was carried out quite rarely - once every 12-15 years. And if one of the peasants escaped or died, the landowner was forced to pay tax for him anyway. The dead or escaped peasants became a burden for the master. This created fertile ground for various kinds of fraud. Chichikov himself hoped to carry out such a scam.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol knew very well how Russian society was organized with its serf system. And the whole tragedy of his poem lies in the fact that Chichikov's scam absolutely did not contradict the current Russian legislation. Gogol denounces the distorted relations between man and man, as well as between man and the state, and speaks of the absurd laws in force at that time. Because of such distortions, events become possible that are contrary to common sense.

Conclusion

Dead Souls is a classic work that, like no other, is written in the style of Gogol. Quite often, Nikolai Vasilyevich laid some kind of anecdote or a comic situation as the basis of his work. And the more ridiculous and unusual the situation, the more tragic the real state of affairs is.

Heroes of "Dead Souls"

Dead Souls is a work of the writer Nikolai Gogol. The plot of the work was suggested to him by Pushkin. At first, the writer was going to show Russia only partially, satirically, but gradually the idea changed and Gogol tried to portray the Russian order in such a way, "where there would be not one thing to laugh at," but more fully. The task of fulfilling this plan was pushed back by Gogol to the second and third volumes of Dead Souls, but they were never written. Only a few chapters of the second volume remained for descendants. So for more than a century and a half, Dead Souls have been studied on the basis of that first one. He is also discussed in this article.

Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov arrives in the provincial town N. Its goal is to buy from the neighboring landowners the dead, but still considered alive, serfs, thus becoming the owner of several hundred serf souls. Chichikov's idea was based on two positions. Firstly, in the Little Russian provinces of those years (40s of the XIX century) there was a lot of free land, provided by the authorities to everyone. Secondly, there was a practice of "mortgaging": a landowner could borrow from the state a certain amount of money to secure his real estate - villages with peasants. If the debt was not repaid, the village became the property of the state. Chichikov was going to create a fictitious settlement in the Kherson province, place peasants bought for a cheap price in it (after all, it was not noted in the deed that they were “dead souls”), and, having given the village on a “mortgage”, receive “live” money.

“Oh, I am Akim-simplicity,” he said to himself, “I am looking for mittens, but both are in my belt! Yes, buy all these that have died out, have not yet submitted new revision tales, buy them, let's say, a thousand, yes, let's say, the board of trustees will give two hundred rubles per capita: that's two hundred thousand capital! ... True, without land cannot be bought or mortgaged. Why, I will buy for withdrawal, for withdrawal; now the lands in the Tauride and Kherson provinces are given away for free, just populate them. I’ll move them all there! to their Kherson! let them live there! And resettlement can be done in a legal way, as it should be in the courts. If they want to examine the peasants: perhaps I don't mind here either, why not? I will also present a certificate signed by the captain-police officer. The village can be called Chichikova Slobodka or by the name given at baptism: the village of Pavlovskoye "

The stupidity and greed of the landlord sellers ruined Pavel Ivanovich's scam. Nozdryov blabbed in the city about Chichikov's strange inclinations, and Korobochka came to the city to find out the real price of "dead souls", for she was afraid of being deceived by Chichikov

The main characters of the first volume of "Dead Souls"

— Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov

“Gentleman, not handsome, but not bad-looking, neither too fat nor too thin; one cannot say that he is old, but not so that he is too young "

— Landowner Manilov

“From a glance, he was a prominent person; his features were not devoid of pleasantness, but this pleasantness seemed to have been overly imparted to sugar; in his methods and turns there was something ingratiating in his disposition and acquaintance. He smiled alluringly, was blond, with blue eyes. In the first minute of a conversation with him you cannot but say: "What a nice and kind person!" In the next minute you won't say anything, but in the third you will say: "The devil knows what this is!" - and you will move away; if you don’t leave, you will feel mortal boredom ... You cannot say that he was engaged in farming, he never even went to the fields, the farming went somehow by itself. When the bailiff said: "It would be nice, sir, to do this and that", - "Yes, not bad:" he usually answered, smoking a pipe ... When a peasant came to him and scratched the back of his head with his hand, he said: "Master, let me to leave for work, to "give money", - "Go," - he said, smoking a pipe, and it did not even occur to him that the man was going to get drunk. Sometimes, looking from the porch to the courtyard and the pond, he talked about how nice it would be if suddenly an underground passage was made from the house or a stone bridge was built across the pond, on which there would be shops on both sides, and that they would sit in them. merchants and sold various small goods needed by the peasants. At the same time, his eyes became extremely sweet and his face assumed the most contented expression; however, all these projects ended with only one word. There was always some book in his office, bookmarked on page fourteen, which he had been reading constantly for two years. "

With the "filing of Gogol" the concept of "manilovism" entered the Russian language, which has become synonymous with laziness, idle idle daydreaming

— Landowner Sobakevich

“When Chichikov glanced sideways at Sobakevich, this time he seemed to him very similar to an average-sized bear. To complete the resemblance, the tailcoat he wore was completely bear-colored, the sleeves were long, the trousers were long, he stepped with his feet at random and sideways and stepped incessantly on other people's legs. The complexion was red-hot, hot, as is the case on a copper penny. It is known that there are many such persons in the world, over whose decoration nature was not for long wise ... having said: "He lives!" Sobakevich had the same strong and marvelously stunning image: he held it more downward than upward, did not turn his neck at all, and due to such non-rotation he rarely looked at the one with whom he was talking, but always either at the corner of the stove or at the door. ... Chichikov once again glanced at him sideways as they passed the dining room: bear! perfect bear! "

— Landowner Korobochka

“A minute later, the hostess came in, an elderly woman, in some kind of sleeping cap, put on hastily, with a flannel around her neck, one of those mothers, small landowners who cry for crop failures, losses and keep their heads a little to one side, and meanwhile are gaining a little money in variegated bags placed on the drawers with a chest of drawers. In one bag they take all the rubles, in the other half a ruble, in the third quarter, although it looks like there is nothing in the chest of drawers except linen, and night jackets, and thread hanks, and a ripped cloak, which then has to turn into a dress, if the old somehow burns out during the baking of holiday cakes with all sorts of yarn or it gets rid of itself. But the dress will not burn out and will not wear out by itself: the old woman is thrifty "

— Landowner Nozdryov

“He was of average height, a very well-built fellow with full ruddy cheeks, teeth as white as snow, and jet-black sideburns. He was fresh as blood and milk; health seemed to sprinkle from his face. - Ba, ba, ba! he cried suddenly, spreading both hands at the sight of Chichikov. - What are the fates? Tchichikov recognized Nozdrev, the same one with whom he had dined with the prosecutor and who in a few minutes got on such a short leg with him that he began to say "you", although, however, he, on his part, did not give any reason for this. - Where did you go? - said Nozdryov and, without waiting for an answer, continued: - And I, brother, from the fair. Congratulations: blown away! Do you believe that I've never been so blown out in my life ... "

— Landowner Plyushkin

“At one of the buildings, Chichikov soon noticed a figure who began to quarrel with a peasant who had arrived in a cart. For a long time he could not recognize what gender the figure was: a woman or a man. Her dress was completely indefinite, very much like a woman's bonnet, on her head was a cap, which is worn by village courtyard women, only one voice seemed to him somewhat husky for a woman ... Here our hero inevitably stepped back and looked ... intently. He happened to see a lot of all kinds of people; but he had never seen anything like it. His face was nothing special; it was almost the same as that of many thin old people, one chin only protruded very far forward, so that he had to cover it with a handkerchief every time so as not to spit; the little eyes had not yet gone out and were running from under the high-grown eyebrows, like mice, when, sticking out their sharp muzzles from the dark holes, their ears alert and their whiskers blinking, they look out for a cat or a mischievous boy hiding somewhere, and smelling suspiciously the very air. Much more remarkable was his attire: no means and efforts could have been able to get to the bottom of what his dressing gown was concocted: the sleeves and upper floors were so greasy and shiny that they looked like leather, which goes like boots; back and instead of two, four floors dangled, from which cotton paper clung in flakes. He also had something tied around his neck that could not be made out: whether a stocking, a garter, or a belly, but not a tie. In a word, if Chichikov had met him, so dressed up, somewhere at the church doors, he would probably have given him a copper penny "

In Russian, the concept of "Plyushkin" has become synonymous with stinginess, greed, pettiness, painful hoarding

Why is Dead Souls called a poem?

Literary scholars and literary critics answer this question vaguely, uncertainly, and unconvincingly. Allegedly, Gogol refused to define Dead Souls as a novel, since it “does not resemble either a story or a novel” (Gogol's letter to Pogodin, November 28, 1836); and settled on a poetic genre - a poem. How “Dead Souls” are not like a novel, how they differ from works of about the same order of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, most likely the author himself did not know. Perhaps he was simply not allowed to sleep by the laurels of Pushkin, whose "Eugene Onegin" was a novel in verse. And here is a poem in prose.

The history of the creation of "Dead Souls". Briefly

• 1831, May - Gogol's acquaintance with Pushkin

  the plot of the poem was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The poet summarized the story of an enterprising man who sold dead souls to the board of trustees, for which he received a lot of money. Gogol wrote in his diary: "Pushkin found that such a plot of Dead Souls is good for me in that it gives me complete freedom to travel with the hero all over Russia and bring out many different characters."

• 1835, October 7 - Gogol said in a letter to Pushkin that he began work on "Dead Souls"
• 1836, June 6 - Gogol left for Europe
• 1836, November 12 - a letter to Zhukovsky from Paris: “… he started working on the“ Dead Souls ”, which he started in St. Petersburg. I redid everything I had begun again, thought over the whole plan and now I am leading it calmly, like a chronicle ... "
• 1837, September 30 - letter to Zhukovsky from Rome: “I am cheerful. My soul is light. I work and I hasten with all my might to complete my work "
• 1839 - Gogol finished the draft of the poem
• 1839, September - Gogol returned to Russia for a short time and soon after his return read the first chapters to his friends Prokopovich, Annenkov

  "The expression of unfeigned delight, which was evidently on all faces at the end of the reading, touched him ... He was pleased .."

• 1840, January - Gogol read the chapters of "Dead Souls" in the Aksakovs' house
• 1840, September - Gogol left for Europe again
• 1840, December - the beginning of work on the second volume of "Dead Souls"
• 1840, December 28 - letter to T. Aksakov from Rome: “I am preparing the first volume of“ Dead Souls ”for the perfect purification. I change, clean up, recycle a lot at all ... "
• 1841, October - Gogol returned to Moscow and handed over the manuscript of the poem to the censorship. Censorship in Moscow banned the publication of the work.
• 1842, January - Gogol presented the manuscript of Dead Souls to censors in St. Petersburg
• 1842, March 9 - the St. Petersburg censorship gave permission to publish the poem
• 1842, May 21 - The book went on sale and was sold out; this event caused a fierce controversy in the literary community. Gogol was accused of slander and hatred of Russia, but Belinsky stood up to defend the writer, highly appreciating the work.
• June 1842 - Gogol left for the West again
• 1842-1845 - Gogol worked on the second volume
• 1845, summer - Gogol burned the manuscript of the second volume
• 1848, April - Gogol returned to Russia and continued work on the unfortunate second volume. The work proceeded slowly.

  In the second volume, the author wanted to portray heroes different from the characters in the first part - positive ones. And Chichikov had to go through a certain ritual of purification, becoming on the true path. Many drafts of the poem were destroyed by order of the author, but some parts were still preserved. Gogol believed that life and truth were completely absent in the second volume, he doubted himself as an artist, hating the continuation of the poem

• 1852, winter - Gogol met with the Archpriest of Rzhev Matvey Konstantinovsky. who advised him to destroy some of the chapters of the poem
• 1852, February 12 - Gogol burned the white manuscript of the second volume of "Dead Souls" (only 5 chapters survived in incomplete form)

A great poem, a holiday of absurdity and grotesque, from which, in a paradoxical way, 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 bird-troika, 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 to everyone's liking. Having charmed the governor, city officials and neighboring landowners, Chichikov begins to go around the latter with a mysterious purpose: he buys up dead souls, that is, recently deceased serfs who have not yet been included in audit tale ⁠ and therefore are formally considered alive. Having visited successively caricatures, each in its own way, Sobakevich, Manilov, Plyushkin, Korobochka and Nozdrev, Chichikov draws up a bill 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. chthonic forces, a scandal breaks out, and Chichikov, as Nabokov put it, "leaves the city on the wings of one of those delightful lyrical digressions ... which the writer places every time between the character's business meetings." Thus ends the first volume of the poem conceived by Gogol in three parts; the third volume was never written, and the second was burned by Gogol - today we only have access to its reconstructions based on the surviving excerpts, and in different editions, therefore, speaking about "Dead Souls", we mean in general only the first volume of them, completed and published by the author.

Nikolay Gogol. An engraving of a portrait by Fyodor Moller in 1841

When was it written?

In a famous letter to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye dated October 7, 1835, Gogol asks the poet for a "plot for a comedy", for which there 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 content is unknown, since the manuscript has not survived) and, most importantly, the name "Dead Souls" was invented.

"Dead Souls" were conceived as a satirical roguish novel, a parade of evil caricatures, as Gogol wrote in The Author's Confession, "if anyone had seen those monsters that came out of 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 version that did not come down to us, and exclaimed: “God, how sad is our Russia!" 1 ⁠ ... Thus, although later Gogol's poem acquired a reputation as an angry verdict of 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 nasty things are not worth malice; it is better to show all their insignificance ... ", and most importantly, instead of random deformities, I decided to depict" some of those on which truly Russian, our root properties are imprinted more noticeably and deeper, "showing precisely the national character in both good and bad. Satire turned into an epic, a poem in three parts. Its plan was drawn up in May 1836 in St. Petersburg; On May 1, 1836, the premiere of The Inspector General took place there, and in June Gogol went abroad, where he spent the next 12 years with short interruptions. Gogol begins the first part of his main work in the fall of 1836 in the Swiss city of Vevey, rewriting everything he had begun in St. Petersburg; from there he writes to Zhukovsky about his work: "All Russia will appear in him!" - and for the first time calls him a poem. Work continues in the winter of 1836/37 in Paris, where Gogol learns about the death of Pushkin - from that time on, the writer sees in his work something like Pushkin's spiritual testament. Gogol read the first chapters of the poem to familiar 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 seek 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 wild imagination: all things and phenomena are presented on a grotesque scale, a random situation turns into a farce, a word dropped in passing gives an escape in the form of an expanded image, from which a more economical writer could make a whole story. Dead Souls owe much of its comic effect to a naive and important storyteller who, with imperturbable detail, describes sheer nonsense in great detail. An example of such a technique is “surprising in its deliberate, monumental stately idiocy, a conversation about wheel " 2 Adamovich G. Report on Gogol // Voprosy literatury. 1990. No. 5. S. 145. ⁠ in the first chapter of the poem (this technique, which terribly amused his friends, was also used by Gogol in oral improvisations). Lyrical digressions sharply contrast with this manner, where Gogol turns to poetic rhetoric, which borrowed a lot from the holy fathers and is colored with folklore. It is believed that because of its richness, Gogol's language is “untranslatable by 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 illogicalisms, Mikhail Bakhtin uses the term "kokalans" (coq-à-l'âne), literally meaning "from a rooster to a donkey," and in a figurative sense - verbal nonsense, which is based on the violation of stable semantic, logical, spatio-temporal connections (an example of a kokalan - "in the garden of an elder, and in Kiev, an uncle"). Elements of the "kokalan style" - gods and curses, banquet images, laudatory nicknames, "unpublished speech spheres" - and indeed, such common expressions as "Fetuk, haberdashery, mouse foal, jug snout, babyoshka", many contemporary critics found Gogol incoherent; they were also insulted by the information that “the beast of Kuvshinnikov will not let a single woman down”, that “he calls it to use about strawberries”; Nikolay Polevoy Nikolai Alekseevich Polevoy (1796-1846) - literary critic, publisher, writer. From 1825 to 1834 he published the Moscow Telegraph magazine; after the authorities closed the magazine, Polevoy's political views became noticeably more conservative. Since 1841 he published the journal "Russian Bulletin". ⁠ complains about “the servant of Chichikov, who stank and everywhere carries with him a smelly atmosphere; on the drop that drips from the boy's nose into the soup; on fleas that were not combed out by a puppy ... on Chichikov, who sleeps naked; on Nozdryov, who comes in a shirtless robe; on the plucking of hair from the nose by Chichikov. All this appears in abundance on the pages of Dead Souls - even in the most poetic passage about the bird-three, the narrator exclaims: "Damn it all!" Examples of feast scenes are endless - like Sobakevich's dinner, Korobochka's treat, or Governor's breakfast. It is curious that in his judgments about the artistic nature of Dead Souls, Polevoy actually anticipated Bakhtin's theories (albeit in an evaluative-negative way): “If we admit crude farces, Italian buffoonery, epic poems inside out (travesti), poems like“ Elisha "Maikov, is it possible not to regret that the wonderful talent of Mr. Gogol is spent on such creatures!"

The quill 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 amazed his contemporaries with its originality - no direct pretexts were sought for him either in Russian literature or in the West, which was noted, for example, by Herzen: “Gogol is completely free from foreign influence; he did not know any literature when he 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 / Podgot. text, comp., entry. article and note. V.K.Kantor and A.L. Ospovata. Moscow: 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 Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy, Joyce's Ulysses and Portrait of Henry James. Mikhail Bakhtin mentions 5 Bakhtin M. M. Rabelais and Gogol (The art of words and folk culture of laughter) // Bakhtin M. M. Questions of literature and aesthetics. M .: Fiction, 1975.S. 484-495. ⁠ about "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 emigration, Svyatopolk-Mirsky published a collection of poems, took part in the First World War and in the Civil War on the side of the White movement. In emigration since 1920; there he publishes "History of Russian Literature" in English, is fond of Eurasianism and establishes the magazine "Versty". In the late 1920s, Svyatopolk-Mirsky became interested in Marxism and in 1932 moved to the USSR. After his return, he signs his literary works as “D. Mirsky ". In 1937 he was sent into exile, where he died. ⁠ notes in the work of Gogol the influence of the tradition of the Ukrainian folk and puppet theater, Cossack ballads ("dooms"), comic authors from Moliere to the vaudevilleists 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 "Gantz Kuchelgarten", which was destroyed by criticism, after which Gogol bought and burned all available copies), French romanticism led by Hugo, Jules Jeanin Jules-Gabrielle Jeanin (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 the novel "The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman", which became the programmatic text of the French violent 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, wrote his first novels under a pseudonym. Became famous for 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 this could not have been expected." Russian predecessors of Gogol - Pushkin and especially Griboyedov (in Dead Souls there are many indirect quotes from, for example, the abundance of offscreen characters useless for the plot, directly borrowed situations, vernacular, which critics reproached both Griboyedov and Gogol).

The parallel of "Dead Souls" with Dante's "Divine Comedy" 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 polemic 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 awaited as a reward by a home; Chichikov does not have his own Penelope, but he often dreams of "a woman, a nursery". According to the recollections of acquaintances, Gogol read the "Odyssey" in Zhukovsky's translation aloud to them, admiring every line.

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Not without censorship delays. In general, Gogol's relationship with the censorship was rather ambiguous - for example, Nicholas I personally admitted to the production, whom Gogol later counted on in various senses - he even asked for (and received) material assistance as the first Russian writer. Nevertheless, we had to bother about Dead Souls: “Perhaps, Gogol never used so much worldly experience, heart-to-heart, ingratiating affection and feigned anger, as in 1842, when he began publishing Dead Souls, - later recalled the critic Pavel Annenkov Pavel Vasilievich Annenkov (1813-1887) - literary critic and publicist, the first biographer and researcher of Pushkin, the founder of Pushkin studies. He made friends with Belinsky, in the presence of Annenkov Belinsky wrote his actual testament - "Letter to Gogol", under Gogol's dictation, Annenkov rewrote "Dead Souls". 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 last works to Annenkov before publication. ⁠ .

At a meeting of the Moscow censorship committee on December 12, 1841, "Dead Souls" were entrusted with the care of the censor Ivana Snegireva Ivan Mikhailovich Snegirev (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 over 30 years. Snegirev is one of the first researchers of Russian folklore and popular prints, studied the monuments of ancient Russian architecture. He introduced the term "parsuna" into art history, meaning portrait painting 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 he was afraid to let the book go to print on his own and handed it over to his colleagues for review. Here, difficulties were caused, first of all, by the name itself, which, in the opinion of the censors, meant godlessness (after all, the human soul is immortal) and condemnation of serfdom (in fact, Gogol never meant either one or the other). They also feared that Chichikov's scam would set a bad example. Faced with the ban, Gogol took the manuscript from the Moscow censorship committee and sent it to St. Petersburg through Belinsky, asking him to plead with Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, Vyazemsky and his good friend Alexander Smirnov-Rosset ⁠ ... Petersburg censor Nikitenko Alexander Vasilyevich Nikitenko (1804-1877) - critic, editor, censor. In 1824 Nikitenko, who came from peasants, received his freedom; he was able to go to university and make an academic career. In 1833 Nikitenko began working as a censor and by the end of his life he rose to the rank of privy councilor. From 1839 to 1841 he was the editor of the journal "Son of the Fatherland", from 1847 to 1848 - the journal "Sovremennik". The memoirs of Nikitenko, which were published posthumously, at the end of the 1880s, gained fame. ⁠ reacted to the poem enthusiastically, but found it completely impassable "The Tale of the Captain Kopeikin " 6 Russian antiquity. 1889. No. 8. S. 384-385. ⁠ ... Gogol, who treasured The Tale exclusively and saw no reason to print the poem without this episode, significantly altered it, removing all the dangerous passages, and finally received permission. “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” was published before the revolution in a censored version; Of the significant censorship edits, one should also mention the name, which Nikitenko changed to "The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls", thus shifting the emphasis from political satire to a rogue novel.

The first copies of "Dead Souls" left the printing house on May 21, 1842, two days later Gogol departed 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 painted by Gogol for the 1846 edition

How was she received?

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

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 with him all night about "Dead Souls" and read them, again I don’t remember. Then it happened between the youth; two or three will converge: "Why not read to us, gentlemen, Gogol!" - sit down and read, and perhaps all night. " Gogol's words came into vogue, young people cut their hair "like 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 the students, who read the poem out loud in a crowd so as not to argue about the queue: “... For several days we read and re-read this great, incredibly original, incomparable , a national and ingenious creation. We were all as if drunk with delight and amazement. Hundreds and thousands of Gogol's phrases and expressions were immediately known to everyone by heart and went into 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., Foreword. and comments. S. I. Mashinsky. M .: State. published. artist lit., 1952, pp. 401-402. ⁠ .

However, opinions differed regarding Gogol's words and phrases. Former publisher "Moscow Telegraph" An encyclopedic journal published by Nikolai Polev from 1825 to 1834. The magazine appealed to a wide range of readers and advocated the "education of the middle class." In the 1830s, the number of subscribers reached five thousand, a record audience at that time. 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, beast ... all the inn's sayings, abuse, jokes, everything that you can hear enough in the conversations of lackeys, servants, cabs ”; Gogol's language, Polevoy argued, “can be called a collection of errors against logic and grammar ... " 9 Russian Bulletin. 1842. No. 5-6. P. 41. ⁠ I agreed with him Thaddeus Bulgarin Faddey Venediktovich Bulgarin (1789-1859) - critic, writer and publisher, the most controversial character in the literary process of the first half of the 19th century. In his youth, Bulgarin fought in the Napoleonic detachment and even took part in the campaign against Russia; from the mid-1820s he was a supporter of Russian reactionary politics and an agent of the Third Section. The novel Ivan Vyzhigin, written by Bulgarin, was a great success and is considered one of the first rogue novels in Russian literature. Bulgarin published the Northern Archive magazine, the first private newspaper with a political section, Northern Bee, and the first theatrical anthology, Russian Talia. ⁠ : “Not a single Russian composition has so much tastelessness, dirty pictures and evidence of a 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, it often sins against grammar," but "Gogol has something that makes one not notice the negligence of his language - there is a syllable," and pricked the prim reader who is offended in print by those who 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 - “no poet in Russia had such a strange fate as Gogol: even people who knew him by heart did not dare to see him as a great writer creations " 11 Belinsky V.G. Chichikov's Adventures, or Dead Souls. // Notes of the Fatherland. 1842.T. XXIII. No. 7. Dept. VI "Bibliographic Chronicle". S. 1-12. ⁠ ; now he has passed 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 were divided into parties. Slavophiles No. 1 say that this is the apotheosis of Russia, the "Iliad" is ours, and they praise, next, others are furious, they say that this is an anathema to Russia and that they are scolding for that. The anti-Slavs also split in two. The dignity of a work of art is great 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 right 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 this relationship). Belinsky did not lag behind: “Gogol's influence on Russian literature was enormous. Not only did all the young talents rush to the path indicated to them, but some writers who had already gained fame followed the same path, leaving their old one. Hence the emergence 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 was not influenced by Gogol.

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 portrayed Gogol on the famous canvas "The Appearance of Christ to the People" in the form of a figure standing closest to Jesus. Already during Gogol's life and soon after his death, German, Czech, English, French translations of the poem appeared.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Dead Souls was adapted by Mikhail Bulgakov. In his feuilleton "The Adventures of Chichikov," the heroes of Gogol's poem found themselves in Russia in the 1920s, and Chichikov made a dizzying career, becoming a billionaire. In the early 1930s, Bulgakov's play Dead Souls was a success at the Moscow Art Theater; he also created a screenplay, which, however, was not used by anyone. Gogol's poem was reflected in literature and more indirectly: for example, Yesenin's poem "I do not regret, I do not call, I do not 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 by the lines "Oh, my lost freshness" and "I have now become more stingy in desires").

The names of some of the Gogol landowners became common nouns: Lenin accused the populists of "Manilov projection", Mayakovsky titled a poem about a greedy inhabitant "Plyushkin". The schoolchildren have learned the passage about the three-bird by heart for decades.

Gogol's poem was screened for the first time back in 1909 in Khanzhonkov's studio; in 1960, Leonid Trauberg directed the film-performance "Dead Souls" based on Bulgakov's play; in 1984, Mikhail Schweitzer directed the five-part film with Alexander Kalyagin in the title role. From the newest interpretations, one can recall the "Case of" Dead Souls "directed by Pavel Lungin and a loud 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 years. Tretyakov Gallery. Ivanov painted 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" may seem, it was not only feasible, but formally did not violate the laws and even had precedents.

The deceased serfs, listed as the landlord by audit tale A document with the results of the census of the taxable population carried out in Russia in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. In fairy tales, the name, patronymic, surname, age of the owner of the yard and members of his family were indicated. 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 excess rent and yield to him for a pittance the dead (but living on paper) peasants, whom he would then be able to mortgage. The only hitch was that the peasants could neither be bought nor 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 unfolds a decade earlier), but Chichikov allowed it easy: “Why, I’ll buy for withdrawal, for withdrawal; now the lands in the Tauride and Kherson provinces are given away for free, just populate them. "

The plot of the poem, presented 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 Chertkovskaya library, the first public library in Moscow. He wrote monographs about Pushkin, along with Pavel Annenkov, he is considered the ancestor of Pushkin studies. Since 1863 he published the historical journal "Russian Archive". As a historian, he consulted Tolstoy in his work on War and Peace. ⁠ in a note to memories 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 made up, Sollogub acted as Pushkin's second in the first duel with Dantes. ⁠ : “In Moscow, Pushkin was with a friend on the run. 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, pledged them and got a big profit. Pushkin liked it very much. “This could be used to make a novel,” he said among other things. It 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. At the beginning of the 19th century, peasants fled en masse to Bessarabia. To hide from the police, fugitive serfs often adopted the names of the deceased. The city of Bender was especially famous for this practice, whose population was called an "immortal society": for many years not a single death was recorded there. As the investigation showed, in Bendery it was accepted as a rule: the dead “should not be excluded from society”, and their names should be given to newly arrived fugitive peasants.

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

Nikolay Gogol

In general, fraud with audit lists was 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 at the same time only 200 dessiatines Tithing is a unit of land area equal to 1.09 hectares. 200 dessiatines 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. The small local nobles burst into flames, and Kharlampy Petrovich “went to Poltava, and even made a quitrent for his dead peasants, as if for the living. And since his own, and even with the dead, were far from fifty, he collected vodka in the chaise, and he drove through the neighbors and bought them for this vodka of dead souls, wrote them down for himself and, becoming the owner of fifty souls by paper, until his death he smoked wine and gave this theme to Gogol, who was in Fedunki, Pivinsky's estate, 17 versts from Yanovshchyna Another name for the Gogol estate is Vasilyevka. ⁠ ; in addition, the whole Mirgorod region knew about dead souls Pivinsky " 13 Russian antiquity. 1902. No. 1. S. 85-86. ⁠ .

Another local anecdote is recalled by a schoolmate of Gogol: “In Nizhyn ... there was a certain K-ach, a Serb; huge growth, very handsome, with the longest mustache, a terrible explorer - somewhere he bought the land on which he is - it is said in the deed of the fortress - 650 souls; the amount of land is not indicated, but the boundaries are indicated definitively. ... What turned out to be? This land was a neglected cemetery. This very case told 14 Literary heritage. T. 58.M .: Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1952.P. 774. ⁠ Gogol the prince abroad N. G. Repnin Nikolai Grigorievich Repnin-Volkonsky (1778-1845) - military man. He took part 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. Was the governor-general of Saxony and Little Russia. Since 1828, member of the State Council. Due to accusations of improper spending of state money, he resigned. ⁠ »

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

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

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

Why is Dead Souls a poem?

Calling his main work a poem, Gogol, first of all, meant that this is not a story or 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 most versatile of all creatures" calls an epic capable of embracing 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 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 a composition too prearranged", the main thing in it is intrigue: all the events in it should directly relate to the fate of the protagonist, the author cannot "move quickly and in a multitude, in the form of phenomena flying by ”; the novel "does not take a lifetime, but a remarkable incident in life" - and yet Gogol's goal was precisely to create a kind of Russian space.

Konstantin Aksakov immediately declared Gogol a Russian Homer in the press, provoking Belinsky's ridicule, which in reality is not entirely fair. Many of Gogol's techniques, which confused critics, become understandable precisely in the Homeric context: for example, a lyrical digression, for the sake of which the narrator throws Chichikov on the road in order to return to him just as suddenly, or detailed comparisons, parodying, in Nabokov's words, branchy parallels of Homer. Gogol compares the gentlemen in black dress coats at the governor's party, scurrying around the ladies, with a swarm of flies - and from this comparison a whole living picture grows: a portrait of an old housekeeper who chops sugar on a summer day. In the same way, comparing Sobakevich's face with a gourd pumpkin, Gogol recalls that balalaikas are made from such pumpkins - and out of nowhere we see the image of a balalaika player, "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 transfers 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 already happened to say on similar occasions in different places, namely: in the Simbirsk province at Sofron Ivanovich Bespechny, where his daughter Adelaida Sofronovna was then with three sister-in-law: Marya Gavrilovna, Alexandra Gavrilovna and Adelgeida Gavrilovna; from Fedor Fedorovich Perekroev in the Ryazan province; Frol Vasilyevich Victorious in the Penza province and his brother Peter Vasilyevich, where his sister-in-law Katerina Mikhailovna and her grand-sisters Rosa Fedorovna and Emilia Fedorovna were; in the Vyatka province with Pyotr Varsonofievich, where his daughter-in-law's sister Pelageya Yegorovna was with her niece Sofia Rostislavna and two half-sisters - Sofia Alexandrovna and Maklatura Alexandrovna ”- this is not a Homer 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 the Kherson province. 1843 year

Why is Chichikov mistaken for Napoleon?

The similarities between Chichikov and Napoleon are anxiously discussed by the officials of the city of N., having discovered that the most charming Pavel Ivanovich turned out to be some sinister rogue: “... Now they, perhaps, released him from the island of Elena, and now he is making his way to Russia as if Chichikov ". Such a suspicion - along with the maker of counterfeit banknotes, an official of the General-Governor's Office (that is, in fact, an auditor), a noble robber “like Rinalda Rinaldin The robber hero from the 1797 novel by Christian August Vulpius "Rinaldo Rinaldini". ⁠ "- looks like the usual Gogolian absurdism, but it did not appear in the poem by accident.

Also in the "Old World Landowners" someone "said that the Frenchman secretly agreed with the Englishman to release Bonaparte to Russia again." Such conversations could be fueled by rumors about the "hundred days", that is, about Napoleon's escape from the island of Elba and his second brief reign in France in 1815. This, incidentally, is the only place in the poem where the time of action of Dead Souls is specified: “However, one must remember that all this happened soon 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 outback 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 disappeared naturally.

Signs of the time include some indirect signs, such as the beloved postmaster "Lancaster School of Peer Learning" A peer education system whereby older students teach younger students. Invented in Great Britain in 1791 by Joseph Lancaster. The Russian "Society of Mutual Education Schools" was founded in 1819. Many members of secret societies were proponents of the Lancaster system; Thus, the Decembrist VF Raevsky was in 1820 under investigation for "harmful propaganda among the soldiers" precisely in connection with teaching. ⁠ , 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 folk motif during the Napoleonic Wars. Pyotr Vyazemsky cites in the Old Notebook an anecdote about Alexei Mikhailovich Pushkin (the poet's second cousin and a great wit), who served in the militia service under Prince Yuri Dolgorukov during the war of 1806-1807: “At a post station in one of the distant provinces, he noticed in a room the caretaker's portrait of Napoleon, glued to the wall. "Why are you keeping this bastard with you?" “And then, Your Excellency,” he replies, “if it’s unequal, Bonaparte arrives at my station under a false name or on a false road, I immediately recognize him from his portrait, my dear fellow, grab him, tie him up, and present him to his superiors.” "Ah, this is another matter!" - said Pushkin. "

"Oh, you are such a little face!" Chichikov (Alexander Kalyagin)

Or maybe Chichikov is the devil?

“I call the devil a devil, I don’t give him a magnificent suit à la Byron at all 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. ⁠ , - wrote Gogol 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, to see his real face, terrible not in its extraordinaryness, but in its ordinariness, vulgarity; the first one understood 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 dare not be ourselves and agree to be“ like everyone else ”.

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

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 that he is too young "and at the same time, like a real tempter, charms everyone, with everyone speaking his language: with Manilov he is sentimental, with Sobakevich he is businesslike, with Korobochka he is simply rude, knows how to support any conversation: “Whether it was a question of a horse factory, he also spoke about a horse factory ... whether they interpreted the investigation carried out by the treasury chamber, - he showed that he was also not unaware of judicial tricks; was there any reasoning about the biliart game - and in the biliart game he did not miss; whether they spoke about virtue, and about virtue he reasoned very well, even with tears in his eyes. " Chichikov buys human souls not only in a business sense, but also in a figurative sense - for everyone he becomes a mirror, which wins over.

In a lyrical digression, the author directly asks the reader: "And who of you ... in moments of solitary conversations with yourself will deepen this difficult inquiry into your own soul:" Isn't there any part of Chichikov in me too? " Yes, no matter how it is! " - whereas in a neighbor everyone is ready to recognize Chichikov at once.

Do you need something else? Perhaps you are accustomed, my father, to someone scratching their heels at night. My deceased did not fall asleep without it

Nikolay Gogol

And looking in this mirror, the inspector of the medical board turns pale, thinking that under dead souls the patients who died in the infirmaries are understood, because he did not take the necessary measures; the chairman turns pale, speaking in a deal with Plyushkin's attorney contrary to the law; the officials who covered up the recent murder of merchants turn pale: "Everyone suddenly found in themselves such sins that did not even exist."

Chichikov himself constantly admires himself in the mirror, pats himself on the chin and comments approvingly: "Oh, you little face!" - but the reader will never come across a description of his face, with the exception of an apophatic one, although the other heroes of the poem are described in great detail. He does not seem to be reflected in mirrors - like evil spirits in popular beliefs. The figure of Chichikov concentrates that famous Gogol devilry 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 at the heart of Dead Souls “forms of a merry (carnival) walk through the underworld, through the land of death.<…>No wonder, of course, the afterlife is present in the very idea and title of Gogol's novel (Dead Souls). The world of "Dead Souls" is a world of merry underworld.<...>We will find in it both the rabble, and the junk of the carnival "hell", and a whole series of images that are the realization of abusive metaphors " 17 Bakhtin M.M. Rabelais and Gogol (The art of words and folk culture of laughter) // Bakhtin M.M. Questions of literature and aesthetics: Studies of different years. M .: Art. Lit., 1975.S. 484-495. ⁠ .

In this context, Chichikov is a carnival, boisterous devil, insignificant, comical and opposed to the sublime romantic evil that is often found in contemporary Gogol 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 partly a materialist, inclined to denial and doubt, and rejected very much in life ").

This cheerful demonism is like notes 18 ⁠ the researcher Elena Smirnova, condenses towards the end of the first volume in the picture of the “rebellious” city, where evil spirits, alarmed by Chichikov, climbed from all corners: “… And everything that is, has risen. How a whirlwind whirled up until then, it seemed, a dormant city! All the jails and bobaks crawled out of their holes ...<…>Some Sysoy Pafnutievich and MacDonald Karlovich appeared, about whom it had never been heard; in the drawing-rooms a long, long man with a shot-through arm stuck up, of such a tall stature that he had never even seen. Covered droshky appeared in the streets, unknown rulers, rattles, wheel whistles - and porridge was brewed. "

Manilov (Yuri Bogatyrev)

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

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

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

As soon as the narrator touches the ladies in his reasoning, horror attacks him: “The ladies of the city N. were ... no, in no way can I; one feels exactly shyness. The most remarkable thing about the ladies of the city of N. was that ... It’s even strange, the feather 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, we immediately find such, for example, a bold description: “Everything was invented and provided for with extraordinary circumspection; neck, shoulders were open just as much as necessary, and no further; each laid bare her possessions as long as she felt, by her own conviction, that they were capable of destroying a person; the rest, everything was hidden with an extraordinary taste: either some light tie made of ribbon or a scarf lighter than a cake known as kissing, ethereally hugged and wrapped around the neck, or were released from behind the shoulders, from under the dress, small scalloped walls made of thin cambric, known as modesty. These modesty hid in front and behind that which could no longer inflict death on a person, but meanwhile they made one suspect that it was there that the very death took place ”.

Nevertheless, the narrator has fears, and they are not unfounded. Literary critic Elena Smirnova noted that the conversation between "a lady pleasant in all respects" and "a lady just pleasant" in "Dead Souls" is close to the text repeating the chirping 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 trim. Natalia Dmitrievna: No, if they had seen my satin tulle ... "- and so on) and plays the same constructive role in action 19 Smirnova E. A. Gogol's poem "Dead Souls". L .: Nauka, 1987. ⁠ .

In both cases, from discussing fashions, "eyes and paws", the ladies go directly to gossip and, having rebelled in a "general rebellion" (with Griboyedov) or heading "each in its own direction to rebel the city" (with Gogol), they launch a rumor that destroyed the life to the hero: in one case about madness, in the other - about the insidious plan of taking away the governor's daughter. In the ladies of the city N. Gogol partially depicted 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 position and profit from illegal means

Konstantin Masalsky

A striking exception is the governor's daughter. This is generally the only character in the first volume of the poem that the narrator frankly admires - her face, which looks like a fresh testicle, and her thin ears, glowing with warm sunlight. She produces an extraordinary 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 Russo: “She is now like a child, everything is simple in her: she will say that to her he will, he will laugh, where he wants to laugh. "

This light and completely silent female image was to be reincarnated in the second volume of Dead Souls in a positive ideal - Ulinka. We know Gogol's attitude to women from his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, where he published 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 the maid of honor of Empress Maria Feodorovna in 1826. In 1832 she married Nikolai Smirnov, an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She became friends with Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Odoevsky, Lermontov and Gogol. ⁠ , which is often called the "hidden love" of Gogol, who has not been noticed in love affairs throughout his life. The ideal woman, developed by Gogol from his youth under the influence of German romantics, is disembodied, almost silent and clearly inactive - she "revives" a society infected with "moral fatigue" by her very presence and her beauty, which is not without reason that strikes even the most hardened souls: "If already one senseless whim of a beauty was the cause of world upheavals and forced the wisest people to do stupid things, what would happen then if this whim were meaningful and directed towards good? " (As we can see, women's power is ambivalent here too: so from the governor's daughter “there may be a miracle, or there may be rubbish.”)

Answering the question, “what should a young, educated, beautiful, wealthy, moral and still not satisfied with her secular uselessness woman do”, notices 20 A. Terts (A. D. Sinyavsky) In the shadow of Gogol // Sobr. op. in 2 volumes.Vol. 2.M .: Start, 1992.S. 20. ⁠ Abram Tertz, Gogol "does not call her either to cut frogs, or to abolish a corset, or even to bear children, or to refrain from childbearing." “Gogol does not demand anything from her, except for what she already has as a woman - neither moral teachings, nor social activities. Her good task is to be herself, showing everyone for their edification beauty " 21 A. Terts (A. D. Sinyavsky) In the shadow of Gogol // Sobr. op. in 2 volumes.Vol. 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 disgusting, as if I had read Gogol's letters to the Kaluga governor" (Aleksandra Smirnova was the wife of the Kaluga governor) ...

The governor's daughter, who "was only one white and came out transparent and light from the muddy and opaque crowd", is not for nothing the only bright character of the poem: she is the reincarnation of Beatrice, who is supposed to lead the hero out of Dante's hell of the first volume, and this transformation inspires the author with awe.

Museum of London / Heritage Images / Getty Images

Who really means dead souls?

Despite the fact that this phrase has a direct meaning - the deceased serfs, who were called "souls" (just as a herd of horses is counted by "heads"), the figurative meaning is clearly read in the novel - people who are dead in the spiritual sense. Announcing the future positive heroes of his poem, “a husband endowed with divine prowess, or a wonderful Russian girl, which cannot be found anywhere in the world, with all the wondrous beauty of a woman’s soul,” the author adds: “All virtuous people of other tribes will appear dead before them, as dead a book before a living word! " Nevertheless, contemporaries were inclined to oppose these living, Russian and popular ideals not to foreigners, but to officials and landowners, considering 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 the president Golokhvastov 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. " By force, the clever president could finally understand that it was about the souls of the Reviz. As soon as he understood ... there was even more confusion. “No,” shouted the chairman and half of the censors behind him, “even more so, it cannot be allowed, even if there was nothing in the manuscript, but there was only one word: the soul of Revizh,“ this cannot be allowed, it means against serfdom. ” A somewhat limited interpretation of Golokhvastov, it should be noted, was shared by many of Gogol's admirers. Herzen turned out to be somewhat shrewd, seeing in the poem not so much social caricatures as a gloomy epiphany about the human soul: “This title itself bears something terrifying. And he could not name otherwise; not revision - dead souls, but all these Nozdryovs, Manilovs and tutti quanti - these are dead souls, and we meet them at every step.<…>Are not all of us after adolescence, one way or another, leading one of the lives of Gogol's heroes? " Herzen suggests that Lensky in "Eugene Onegin" would have turned into Manilov over the years, had not "shot" its author in time, and laments that Chichikov is "one active person ... and that limited rogue" did not meet a "moral landowner" on his way kindhearted, old-fashioned"- this is exactly what should have happened, 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, is 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 landlords , in fact, not without sympathy). Sobakevich, Manilov and Nozdrev, 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 living in order to increase the price (and after him, Chichikov starts up in the fantasy of Russian prowess): “Yes, of course, they are dead,” Sobakevich said, as if rethinking And remembering that they were really already dead, and then he added: “However, even then say: which of these people who are now listed as living? What kind of people are they? flies, not people. "

Nozdrev (Vitaly Shapovalov)

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

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

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

Sergei Aksakov recalls, for example, with what artistic ecstasy Gogol personally cooked pasta for his friends: “Standing on his feet in front of a bowl, he rolled up the cuffs, and with haste, and at the same time with accuracy, first put in a lot of butter and with two sauce spoons began to stir the pasta, then he put 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. From 1824 he was director of the botanical garden of Moscow University, headed the department of botany. In 1834 he was appointed the first rector of the Imperial University of St. Vladimir in Kiev, but left the post a year later. In 1858 he was the secretary of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. Collected Ukrainian folk songs, studied the history of ancient Russian literature. Conducted a correspondence with Gogol. ⁠ , recalls: “At the stations he bought milk, skimmed the cream and very skillfully made butter out of it using a wooden spoon. He found as much pleasure in this activity as in picking flowers. "

Mikhail Bakhtin, analyzing the Rabelaisian nature of Gogol's work, remarks about Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka: “The food, drink and sex life in these stories are of a festive, carnival-Shrovetide nature”. A hint of this folklore layer can also be seen in the banquet scenes of Dead Souls. The box, wishing to placate Chichikov, puts on the table various pies and pies, of which Chichikov pays the main attention to pancakes, dipping them three at a time in melted butter and praising them. Pancakes on Maslenitsa placate caroling, personifying evil spirits, and Chichikov, who came "God knows where, and even at night" and buys up the dead, in the eyes of the simple-minded "mother landowner" looks like evil spirits.

Food serves to characterize landowners, as well as their wives, villages and surroundings, and it is often during the meal that cute human features emerge in Gogol's cartoons. Feeding Chichikov with “mushrooms, pies, quick-witted Fried eggs baked with bread and ham. ⁠ , shanishki A diminutive form of the word "shangi" - round pies, a traditional Russian dish. In Gogol's notebook - "a kind of cheesecake, a little less." However, shangi, unlike cheesecakes, are not made sweet. ⁠ , spongers "Donuts, Pancakes" (from Gogol's notebook). ⁠ , pancakes, flat cakes with all sorts of baked goods: baking with onion, baking with poppy seeds, baking with cottage cheese, baking with snapshots Smelt is a small lake fish. ⁠ ", Korobochka reminds of the absolutely dear 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, cheese or with cabbage and buckwheat porridge (" these are the ones that Afanasy Ivanovich is very fond of ”). And in general she is a good housewife, takes care of the peasants, hospitably lays feather beds for the suspicious night guest and invites them to scratch their heels.

Sobakevich, who in one sitting kills the side of a mutton or a whole sturgeon, but will not take a frog or an oyster (food of "Germans and French") in his mouth, "even covered with sugar", reminds at this moment an epic Russian hero like Dobrynya Nikitich, who drank at once Charu of green wine in a bucket and a half ”, - it was not for nothing that his late father went to the bear alone; Russian bear is not at all a pejorative definition in the Gogolian world.

Nozdryov was in some respects a historical person. Not a single meeting he attended was complete without history. Some story certainly happened: either the gendarmes would take him out of the hall under the arms, or they were forced to push out their own friends.

Nikolay Gogol

Manilov, who has built himself a “temple of solitary reflection” and says “you” to the coachman, offers Chichikov “simply, according to Russian custom, cabbage soup, but from a pure heart” - an attribute of a rural idyll among happy villagers. Manilovka and its inhabitants are a parody of the literature of sentimentalism. In "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" Gogol writes: "Karamzin's imitators served as a pitiful caricature of himself and brought both the syllable and the thoughts to sugar cloying." the pleasantness seemed to have been transferred too much to the sugar. " Lunch in Manilovka, contrary to custom, 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:“ Razin, darling , my mouth, I'll put this piece for you ”, thereby showing, though 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 chef from just about anything: “was there pepper next to him - he sprinkled pepper, did he come across cabbage - poured cabbage, stuffed milk, ham, peas, in a word, roll-go "; but Nozdryov drinks a lot - and also some kind of utter rubbish: Madeira, which the merchants "ran mercilessly with rum, and sometimes they poured in royal vodka," some kind of "burgon and champagnon together", brandy, in which "fuselage was heard in all its might. "

Finally, Plyushkin - the only one in Dead Souls, not a comic, but a tragic figure, whose story of transformation the author tells us, thereby inevitably evoking sympathy - does not eat or drink at all. His treat - a carefully preserved biscuit 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 clothed himself with flesh and has already become all flesh, and there is almost no soul in him.<…>Oh, if you could tell him what my Plyushkin has to say if I get to the third volume of Dead Souls! "

Gogol no longer had to describe this revival: there is a tragic paradox in the fact that in the last days Gogol was cruelly fasting, as is believed, starving himself, renouncing food and laughter - that is, turning himself into Plyushkin in some spiritual sense.

Roast suckling pig. 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 else ... they have starved a virtuous person to the point that now there is not even a shadow of virtue on him, and there were only ribs and skin instead of a body ... hypocritically invoking a virtuous person ... they do not respect a virtuous person. No, it's time to finally hide the scoundrel. "

One for Chichikov does not appear any special meanness, hardly anyone suffered from his scams (except indirectly - the prosecutor died of fright). Nabokov calls him "a vulgar gigantic caliber", noting at the same time: "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 caricatured vulgarity of Chichikov, he is the Russian who loves fast driving, in the 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 the other characters in Dead Souls: he is active. Everyday 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 a plan. " In this respect, he is the same Russian man whom "they sent ... 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, so far his activity is only acquisitive, and not creative, in which the author sees his main vice. Nevertheless, it is and only the energy of Chichikov that moves the action from the spot - from the movement of his bird-three "everything flies: versts fly, merchants fly towards them on the irrigation of their wagons, a forest with dark lines of fir and pines flies from both sides", all Russia rushes somewhere.

The whole city there is like this: the swindler sits on the swindler and drives him away with the swindler. All Christ sellers. There is only one decent person there - the prosecutor, and even that, if you tell the truth, is a pig

Nikolay Gogol

All Russian classics dreamed of an energetic, active Russian hero, but it seems they did not believe in his existence too much. The Russian mother laziness, who was born before us, was perceived by them as the source of all evil and sorrow - but at the same time as the basis of the national character. An example of a good master, immersed in vigorous activity, Gogol displays in the second volume of Dead Souls, it is no coincidence that he endows him with the difficult-to-pronounce and obviously foreign (Greek) surname Kostanzhoglo: "A Russian man ... cannot live without a prod ... So it will doze off, and it will turn sour." The next famous businessman in Russian literature, described by Goncharov in Oblomov, is the half-German Andrei Stolts, while undoubtedly the prettier Oblomov is the direct heir of Tentetnikov, Gogol's “bumpkin, lazy person, boobak”, who in his youth had plans for vigorous management, and then settled in a dressing gown on the sofa. Complaining about Russian laziness, both Gogol and his followers did not seem to believe in the possibility of eradicating it without the participation of business-minded foreigners - but contrary to reason, they could not overcome the feeling that bargaining was a spiritless, vulgar and vile property. The word "vile" in the archaic sense meant a low clan (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, the Russian master, opposes himself to the “other” - a low, uneducated person whom “need rushes from corner to corner, he runs day and day” (“There are many Germans such, - said Zakhar sullenly ").

This situation changed only with the arrival of common heroes in literature, who could not afford to unwind. It is characteristic that in the famous production of Dead Souls at the Gogol Center in 2013, Chichikov was played by the American Odin Byron, and the final poetic monologue about the bird-three was replaced by a perplexing question: "Rus, what do you want from me?" Explaining this choice, director Kirill Serebrennikov interprets the conflict of Dead Souls as a clash of a “man from the new world”, industrial and rational, with a “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 Elder Zosim, but Chichikov. This will not give out! Chichikov, Chichikov is the only one capable of moving and taking out a cart of history, ”Gogol foresaw at a time when he had not dreamed of any development of capitalism in Russia. let you down! .. " 22 A. Terts (A. D. Sinyavsky) In the shadow of Gogol // Sobr. op. in 2 volumes.Vol. 2.M .: Start, 1992.S. 23. ⁠

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

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

Did Gogol portray himself in Dead Souls?

In Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol describes his work as a method 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, making fun of 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 traits with which he endowed his characters look rather touching, in any case, it is they that 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 weaknesses of this kind. At the end of Chapter VII of "Dead Souls" one of the many seemingly random, but incredibly lively secondary characters is shown for a minute - the Ryazan lieutenant, "a big, apparently, a hunter to boots", who has already ordered four pairs and could not lie down to sleep, constantly trying on the fifth: "the boots, as if, were well-sewn, and for a long time he raised his leg and looked briskly and at the wonderfully 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 cited (also from Arnoldi's memoirs) Abram Tertz: "In his youth, Gogol had a passion for acquiring unnecessary things - all kinds of inkpots, vases, paperweights: later it separated and developed into Chichikov's hoarding, removed forever from the author's household property" ( this observation is confirmed by many memoirists: partly in the forms of self-improvement, partly for the practical reason that Gogol spent most of his life on the road and all his belongings fit into one chest, the writer at some point renounced fraud Addiction to collecting things, receiving gifts, bribes. From the point of view of Christianity, it is a sin. ⁠ and gave all the graceful little things dear to his heart 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 - Sergei Aksakov recalls how in Zhukovsky's house he saw the writer at work in an amazing outfit: "Instead of boots, long woolen Russian stockings above the knees; instead of a frock coat, over a flannel camisole, a velvet spenzer; the neck is wrapped in a large multi-colored scarf, and on the head there is a velvet, crimson, gold-embroidered kokoshnik, very similar to the headdress of Mordovians. "

"BUT! patched, patched! " the man cried out. He also added a noun to the word patched, very successful, but not used in small talk, and therefore we will skip it.<...>The Russian people are strongly expressed!

Nikolay Gogol

The habit of the governor of the city N., who, as you know, was "a great kind-hearted man and sometimes even 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 carve out neck scarves made of muslin and cambric, let the vests go a few lines lower, etc., and he was doing this very seriously ”; he loved to knit, cut dresses for the sisters.

Not only himself, but also those around him, Gogol, however, let him into business even before, when working on "Dead Souls", he set out to portray 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 - “a ridiculous provincial lady who annoyed her friends with the statement that steam locomotives, steamers and other innovations were invented by her son Nikolai (and she drove her son into a frenzy, delicately hinting that he was the author of every her vulgar romance) "- here one cannot but recall Khlestakov:" There are, however, 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 visit Sopikov and Khrapovitsky, meaning all sorts of dead dreams on the side, on the back and in all other positions,” which cut the ear of critics in “Dead Souls,” are said to have been used by Gogol in his life.

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

Arriving from Little Russia to 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 traveled almost continuously. At the same time, both 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 for treatment in Baden-Baden, Carlsbad, Marienbad, Ostend; at the end of his life he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Russia, Gogol did not have his own home - he lived with friends for a long time (most of all, with Stepan Shevyrev and Mikhail Pogodin), but he rather unceremoniously resettled his sisters as 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 for 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 censored, Gogol himself significantly edited the first edition of the story, throwing out the ending, which tells about the adventures of Kopeikin, who robbed an army of “fugitive soldiers” in the Ryazan forests (but “all this, in fact, so to speak, aimed at only one state-owned "; Kopeikin robbed only the state, without touching private people, thereby resembling a people's avenger), and then fled to America, from where he wrote a letter to the sovereign and sought royal favor for his comrades, so that his story would not repeated. The second edition of the story, which is now considered normative, ends only with a hint that Captain Kopeikin has become the chieftain of a gang of robbers.

But even in a softened version, the censor Alexander Nikitenko called "Kopeikin" "absolutely impossible to pass," which plunged the writer into despair. “This is one of the best passages in the poem, and without it, there is a hole that I am unable to pay and sew up,” Gogol wrote to Pletnev on April 10, 1842. - I'd rather decided to remake it than to lose it altogether. I threw out all the generals, Kopeikin's character meant more, so now it is clear that he was the cause of everything and that he was treated well. " Instead of a hero who suffered for his homeland and was driven to despair by the neglect of the authorities, Kopeikin now turned out to be a red tape and a crook with excessive claims: “I cannot, he says, interrupt somehow. I need, he says, to eat a cutlet, a bottle of French wine, to amuse myself, too, in the theater, you know. "

Neither in the corridors nor in the rooms their gaze was not struck by the cleanliness. They did not take care of her 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 and looks like a plug-in novel in it. However, the author treasured this episode so much that he was not ready to print the poem without it and chose to mutilate the story, throwing out all the politically sensitive points from it - obviously, satire was not the main thing in Kopeikin.

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

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 9th grade rank, which gave the right to hereditary nobility and, consequently, to ownership of the soul. 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" like Gogol. " In Kopeikin, the philologist sees a reduced version of the literary "noble robbers"; According to Lotman, this very plot was presented to Gogol by Pushkin, 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 endowed with the parodic features of a romantic robber in Dead Souls: he bursts into Korobochka at night, “like Rinald Rinaldin”, he is suspected of kidnapping the girl, like Kopeikin, he deceives not private individuals, but only the treasury - straight Robin Hood ... But Chichikov, as we know, has many faces, he is a round emptiness, 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 are referred or polemicized: Sobakevich seemed to emerge from an epic, Manilov - from sentimentalism , Plyushkin is the reincarnation of the stingy knight. Kopeikin is a tribute to the romantic, Byronic tradition, which is of paramount importance in the poem; this "literary projection" was really indispensable. In the romantic tradition, it was on the side of the hero — the villain and the 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 vulgar people, 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 issue of moral revival from a different - not romantic, but Christian side. Gogol's parody comparisons - Kopeikin, Napoleon or the Antichrist - remove the halo of nobility from evil, make it funny, vulgar and insignificant, that is, absolutely hopeless, "and it is in its hopelessness that the possibility of an equally complete and absolute rebirth lies."

The poem was conceived as a trilogy, the first part of which was to make the reader horrified by showing all the Russian abominations, the second - to give hope, and the third - to show a picture of the 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 became 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 "Moskvityanine" were 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 all-wise. Pogodin professionally studied the history of Ancient Rus, 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 "the whole of Russia will respond" - he explains that the poem will be "in several volumes." One can imagine what a high bar Gogol set for himself if the first and only published volume of the poem over time began to seem insignificant to him, as "a porch attached to a palace hastily attached by a provincial architect, which was conceived to be built on a colossal scale." Having promised himself and his readers to describe no less than the whole of Russia and give a recipe for the salvation of the soul, announcing a “husband endowed 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 already ready. Pogodin even announced its release in "Moskvityanin" in 1841, for which he had from Gogol reprimand From French - a reproach, a reprimand. ⁠ .

Meanwhile, the work did not go on. Throughout 1843-1845, the writer continually complains in letters to Aksakov, Zhukovsky, Yazykov about a creative crisis, which is then further aggravated by a mysterious illness - Gogol is afraid of "a blues that can intensify an even painful state" and sadly admits: "I tortured myself, raped to write, suffered severe suffering, seeing his impotence, and several times already inflicted illness on himself by such compulsion and could not do anything, and everything came out compulsorily and bad" 24 Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends // Complete Works of N. V. Gogol. 2nd ed. T. 3.M., 1867. ⁠ ... Gogol is ashamed to return to his homeland, as "a man sent for business and returned empty-handed," and in 1845 for the first time burns the second volume of Dead Souls, the fruit of five years of labors. In "Selected Passages ..." in 1846, he explains: "It is necessary to take into account not the delight of any art and literature lovers, but all readers" - and the latter, according to the reader, would rather harm than benefit , several vivid examples of virtue (as opposed to cartoons from the first volume), if you do not immediately show them, "as clear as day," the universal path of moral improvement. By this time, Gogol considered art only a stepping stone to preaching.

The neck and shoulders were open just as much as necessary, and no further; each laid bare her possessions as long as she felt, by her own conviction, that they were capable of destroying a person; the rest everything was hidden with extraordinary taste

Nikolay Gogol

Selected Places became such a sermon, which greatly damaged Gogol's reputation in the liberal camp as an apology for serfdom and an example of church hypocrisy. By the time Selected Places came out, his correspondent friends 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 of Kempis Thomas of Kempis (c. 1379 - 1471) - writer, Catholic monk. Probable author of the anonymous theological treatise "On Imitation of Christ", which became the programmatic text of the spiritual movement "New Piety". The treatise criticizes the outward piety of Christians and praises self-denial as a way of becoming like Christ. ⁠ when you weren't born yet.<…>I do not condemn any, anyone's convictions, if only they were sincere; but, of course, I won't accept anyone else ... And suddenly you put me in prison, like a boy, for reading Thomas of Kempis, by force, not knowing my convictions, but how else? at the legal time, after coffee, and dividing the reading of the chapter, as if for lessons ... And it's funny and annoying ... "

All this mental evolution took place in parallel and in connection with a mental illness, which is described very similar to what until recently was called manic-depressive psychosis, and today it is more accurately called bipolar disorder. Throughout his life, Gogol suffered from mood swings - periods of ebullient 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, replaced by black stripes. Gogol experienced his first such attack in Rome in 1840: “The sun, the sky - everything is unpleasant to me. My poor soul: she has no shelter here. I am now more fit for a monastery than for a secular life. " The very next year, the blues are replaced by ecstatic energy (“I am deeply happy, I know and hear wonderful moments, a wonderful creation is happening and is happening in my soul”) and immoderate conceit, characteristic of the state of hypomania (“Oh, believe my words. henceforth my word "). A year later, in the description of Gogol, chronic depression is recognized 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 motionless in the room, sometimes for 2-3 weeks ... My head was numb. The last ties that bind me to the light have been broken. "

In 1848, Gogol, who was becoming increasingly religious, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but this did not bring him any relief; after that he became a spiritual child of Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, who called for fierce asceticism and inspired the writer with thoughts about the sinfulness of all his creative labor 25 Svyatopolk-Mirsky D.P. The history of Russian literature from ancient times to 1925. Novosibirsk: Svinin and sons, 2006.S. 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 starving himself to death under the guise of fasting.

The text of the second volume of the poem, available to us now, is not a Gogol work, but a reconstruction based on the autographs of five chapters found after the death of Gogol by Stepan Shevyryov (and existing in two editions), separate excerpts and sketches. The second volume of "Dead Souls" first appeared in print in 1855 as an addendum to the second collected works ("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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The plot of the poem was suggested to Gogol by Alexander Pushkin, presumably in September 1831. Information about this goes back to the "Author's Confession", written in 1847 and posted posthumously in 1855, and is confirmed by reliable, albeit indirect evidence.

The documented history of the creation of the work begins on October 7, 1835: in a letter to Pushkin dated that day, Gogol mentions Dead Souls for the first time: “He began to write Dead Souls. The plot stretched out into a pre-long romance and, it seems, will be very funny. "

The first chapters Gogol read to Pushkin before his departure abroad. Work continued in the fall of 1836 in Switzerland, then in Paris and later in Italy. By this time, the creator had developed an attitude to his own work as to the "sacred testament of the poet" and to a literary feat, which at the same time has a patriotic meaning, which should reveal the fate of Russia and the world. In Baden-Baden in August 1837, Gogol read an unfinished poem in the presence of the lady-in-waiting of the government court Alexandra Smirnova (née Rosset) and the son of Nikolai Karamzin, Andrei Karamzin, in October 1838 he read part of the manuscript to Alexander Turgenev. Work on the first volume took place in Rome in late 1837 - early 1839.

Upon his return to Russia, Gogol read chapters from Dead Souls at the Aksakovs' house in Moscow in September 1839, then in St. Petersburg with Vasily Zhukovsky, Nikolai Prokopovich and other close acquaintances. The writer was engaged in the final finishing of the first volume in Rome from the end of September 1840 to August 1841.

Returning to Russia, Gogol read chapters of the novel in the Aksakovs' house and prepared the manuscript for publication. At a meeting of the Metropolitan Censorship Committee on December 12, 1841, obstacles to the publication of the manuscript, submitted to the censor Ivan Snegirev, were clarified, who, in all likelihood, acquainted the creator with the burdens that could appear. Fearing a censorship ban, in January 1842 Gogol sent the manuscript through Belinsky to St. Petersburg and asked his friends A.O. Smirnova, Vladimir Odoevsky, Pyotr Pletnev, Misha Vielgorsky to help with the censorship.

On March 9, 1842, the book was authorized by the censor Alexander Nikitenko, but with a changed title and in the absence of "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin". Even before receiving the censored copy, the manuscript began to be typed in the printing house of the Metropolitan Institute. Gogol himself undertook to design the cover of the novel, wrote in small letters "The Adventures of Chichikov or" and in large letters "Dead Souls". In May 1842, the book was published under the title "The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, a poem by N. Gogol." In the USSR and modern Russia, the name "Chichikov's Adventures" is not used.

Gogol, like Dante Alighieri, intended to make the poem in three volumes, and wrote the 2nd volume, where positive images were displayed and an attempt was made to depict Chichikov's moral degeneration. Gogol probably began work on the second volume in 1840. Work on it lasted in Germany, France and mainly in Italy in 1842-1843. In late June or early July 1845, the writer burned the manuscript of the second volume. When working on the second volume, the significance of the work in the mind of the writer grew beyond the boundaries of actually literary texts, which made the plan practically unrealizable. On the night of February 11-12, 1852, Gogol burned the white manuscript of the second volume (the only eyewitness was the servant Semyon) and died 10 days later. The preliminary manuscripts of four chapters of the second volume (in incomplete form) were found during the opening of the writer's papers, sealed after his death. An autopsy was performed on April 28, 1852 by S.P.Shevyrev, Count A.P. Tolstoy and the capital's civil governor Ivan Kapnist (the son of the poet and playwright V.V. Kapnist). Shevyrev was involved in the re-whitening of the manuscripts, who also took care of its publication. The lists of the second volume were circulated even before its publication. For the first time, the surviving chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls were published as part of Gogol's Complete Works in the summer of 1855. One of the last chapters, which is now being printed together with the first 4 chapters of the second volume, belongs to an earlier edition than the other chapters.

Material source: ru.wikipedia.org

On the Internet, you can read the poem "Dead Souls" on the following websites:

ilibrary.ru - the poem is divided into chapters page by page, comfortable to read

public-library.narod.ru - the whole poem on one page of the website

nikolaygogol.org.ru - the poem is broken down by page. There are 181 pages in total. It is possible to print the text

In what year was the poem Dead Souls written?

The plot of the poem was suggested to Gogol by Alexander Pushkin, presumably in September 1831. Information about this goes back to the "Author's Confession", written in 1847 and posted posthumously in 1855, and is confirmed by reliable, albeit indirect evidence. The documented history of the creation of the work begins on October 7, 1835: in a letter to Pushkin dated that day, Gogol mentions for the first time ...

The poem of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol "Dead Souls" has to be read in the 9th grade. It was written in the 30s - 40s of the 19th century. The author worked on his work for a long time, since his initial idea, which was to show "at least from one side all of Russia", gradually transformed into a more global idea: to show "the entire depth of abomination" that exists in Russia in order to push society "to the beautiful." It cannot be said that the author achieved his ultimate goal, but, as Herzen believed, the poem "Dead Souls" shook Russia. The author defined his work as a prose poem, there are many lyrical digressions in the text. If there were no them, it would have turned out to be a classic novel - a journey, or, in a European way, a "roguish" novel, since the main character of the work is a real swindler. The plot of the poem was suggested to Gogol by A.S. Pushkin shortly before his death.

In Gogol's poem "Dead Souls" the social structure of the Russian Empire in the 20-30s of the XIX century is shown as truthfully as possible - a time when the state experienced certain upheavals: the death of Emperor Alexander I, the Decembrist uprising, the beginning of the reign of the new emperor, Nicholas I. The author draws the capital, in ruled by ministers and generals, a classic provincial town ruled by officials, nobles and merchants, depicts a classic manor house and a serf village, where the main character of the poem, Chichikov, visits in search of the so-called "dead souls." The author, without hesitation or fear of censorship, shows all the negative character traits of "managers" and "those in power", speaks of bureaucratic and landlord arbitrariness, draws "an evil and vile world of real slave owners."

All this is opposed in the poem by the lyrical image of the real people's Russia, which the author admires. The images of "people from the people" are deeper, cleaner, softer, one feels that their souls are alive, that their aspirations are reduced to only one thing - to a free life. The author speaks of people's dreams with sadness, with pain, but at the same time one can feel his genuine belief that someday there will be no Chichikovs and Sobakevichs, that Russia will get rid of "landlord oppression" and "rise from its knees to greatness and glory." ... The poem "Dead Souls" is a kind of social manifesto, an encyclopedia, according to which you can study all the disadvantages of the dominant social order. N. Gogol, like many other enlightened people, understood that it was the serf system that impeded the development of the empire. If Russia can throw off its shackles, then it will get ahead and take a leading position on the world stage. It was not without reason that Belinsky said that Gogol took a bold and new look at Russian reality, not fearing the consequences, drawing a future in which it was no longer the noble-serf “masters of life,” but the Russian peasant, the one who moves the country forward and, being free, does not spare himself and his strength. You can download or read the work of N. Gogol completely online on our website.