Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol (1842)

 

Dead Souls

“Dead Souls” is the second novel by Nikolai Gogol on the List after “The Nose”. This time he toned down the absurdity, but only by a notch. Where most people will agree that a nose cannot just leave the owner, the characters of “Dead Souls” are just about plausible even if they are caricatures and for this reason it is a novel that works so much stronger than “The Nose”.

The novel consists of two parts which share little but the main character, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. Chichikov is a man on a mission, which is to create wealth for himself, but every attempt of his eventually sours because it is just on the other side of the acceptable, either by social or by legal standards, yet ironically the palette of characters Chichikov encounters are practically all further on the wrong side of that boundary, but seems to get away with it.

The first book serves as a particular case. Chichikov arrives in a provincial town and manages to befriend all the gentility of the town with his friendly manner. Chichikov’s ploy to make money involves buying up “dead souls”, meaning peasants who have died, but are not yet registered as dead and so their owner, meaning the landowner of the village, still must pay their tax. I do not know exactly how that ploy works, but clearly the locals do not know either and so seeds of mistrust for Chichikov are being sown, despite Chichikov’s insistence that what he is offering actually helps them.

Every single one of the characters Chichikov meets are odd, in one way or another, and I suspect they each describe archetypes in caricature among the Russian gentility in the first half of the nineteenth century. They may be spendthrifts, drunkards, niggards, or outright corrupt or, in the case of the women, gossips, halfwits or primadonnas. By comparison Chichikov is a boy scout and he becomes our eyes experiencing this zoo of characters, which means that he becomes the hero we associate with and his reactions to these people largely reflect our own. Only rarely does his own oddities pop up, and when they do they appear harmless and innocent compared to those around him. When in the end he is run out of town, it is not because we see him as transgressing any boundaries of significance, but because everybody else make him up to be that transgressor.

The second book is a disjointed affair, partly because large sections are missing, including the ending and partly because it jumps around almost at random. We learn some of Chichikov’s backstory, placing him in a less flattering light then the first book and his transgressions also become more tangible. Still, they are peanuts compared to the characters around him who are all fools in different ways, even the hard working and outward sensible Konstanzhoglo.

While the second book continue to expose the odd characters of Russian gentility, it is more difficult to see the deeper point of this part. Chichikov does get in trouble, but this time not so much from the frenzy of the mob as from actual criminal actions that he really should not have done but have been led to by his own wish for fortune and the examples of all around him.

I much enjoyed the first book. It is amusing in its parody of Russian society, a parody we can understand even not being Russian because these traits are not exclusive to Russians. It is also coherent and realistic enough that I as reader get caught up in the story. The second book, however, often lost me. Every time I thought I had recentred the story, it took me somewhere else, leaving me disoriented and that meant getting disassociated from the story. I still enjoyed the characters, but they became vignettes rather than a coherent entity. This is a shame, and I think “Dead Souls” would have stood stronger had it only contained the first book.

I can only guess at what contemporary Russians may have thought of this satire of their society. The peasants would have been largely illiterate, so the readers would be the very same gentility Gogol was satirizing. Would they have found that amusing? And would it at all have been safe, given the repressiveness which have always pervaded Russian systems of any name? As an outsider it is hard to come to terms with people being the property of somebody else, but that element is never questioned by Gogol and that in itself leaves me baffled.

I have finally found a copy of “Camera Obscura”, an earlier book I have bypassed. It took the bookshop half a year to track it down, but now it is finally here... in Dutch. This will be a reading through Google Len