Nothing to Worry About After All

I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I started Gogol’s Dead Souls. It’s just the kind of classic that I absolutely have to read. But it’s Russian, and it has the word “dead” in the title. Was this going to be as dreary and as hard to get through as the steppes in winter? But it turns out, the book was – I would have to say – delightful.

For the first half of the book, a charismatic fellow named Chichikov rides around finding landowners who are still paying taxes on the dead serfs they own (it was said that Russian lords own so many "souls," so these dead serfs are apparently the dead souls of the title) and offering to buy them. We don't know why for quite a while. We only know that he goes from house to house, one house per chapter, meeting the gentry and offering to buy their dead souls. The interest lies in the various reactions his offer receives. One is relieved to be rid of the tax burden and sells quickly. Another, sure that Chichikov is up to no good, refuses to sell. Yet another fancies himself a great bargainer and asks forty times as much as what Chichikov offers. The ludicrous conversations get funnier and funnier in a satirical way, and they made me start to think that these Boyars, who casually rate their wealth not by acreage or income but by the number of human beings they own, might actually be the dead souls Gogol had in mind. The comic stupidity of Chichikov’s valet and carriage driver make it clear that we’re meant to laugh. And the laughter and the satire, I’m guessing, got even some rich Russians at the time seeing the ridiculousness of claiming to “own a soul.” Perhaps a few even saw the evil in it.

In the second half, Chichikov reveals his plan. I’ll not give it away, but let’s just say that maybe Chichikov himself is among the dead souls. A fire consumed much of the second half of Gogol’s manuscript, and Gogol died young without ever rewriting the end. Apparently some people heard him read it, though, and some took notes or had bits of copies of it, so most editions, including mine, recreate the second half of the novel as much as possible. Still, the book ends mid-sentence. Yet it doesn’t matter at all. Maybe Gogol originally wrote a ripper of an ending that would have been remembered as one of the greatest endings in all of literature. But we don’t know it, so we don’t miss it. And all the while being thoroughly entertained, we seem to get the message Gogol had in view without any tidy wrap-up. 

Come to think of it, maybe a mid-sentence break is actually one of the greatest endings in history. It’s as if Gogol wrote, “I invite you to make a closer examination of your duty and the obligations of your official position on this earth, because all of us now have a dim conception of it, and we hardly — Oh, forget it! This kind of nonsense goes on in the world incessantly, so no ending makes sense. And if you don’t understand what I’m trying to say by this time, you never will. So let’s just call it a day.”