A great poem, a celebration of absurdity and the grotesque, from which, paradoxically, the history of Russian realism is counted. Having conceived a three-part work on the model of The Divine Comedy, Gogol managed to complete only the first volume - in which he introduced a new hero, businessman and rogue into literature, and created an immortal image of Russia as a three-bird rushing in an unknown direction.
comments: Varvara Babitskaya
What is this book about?
A retired official, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, arrives in the provincial town of N., a man devoid of distinctive features and everyone likes. Having charmed the governor, city officials and neighboring landlords, Chichikov begins to go around the latter with a mysterious goal: he buys up dead souls, that is, recently deceased serfs who have not yet been included in revision tale and therefore formally considered alive. Having visited sequentially caricatured, each in his own way, Sobakevich, Manilov, Plyushkin, Korobochka and Nozdryov, Chichikov draws up bills of sale and prepares to complete his mysterious plan, but by the end of the first (and only completed) volume of the poem in the city of N., some kind of chthonic forces, a scandal breaks out, and Chichikov, according to Nabokov's wording, "leaves the city on the wings of one of those delightful lyrical digressions ... which the writer every time places between 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 Gogol burned it - today we only have access to its reconstructions from extant fragments, and in different editions, therefore, speaking of "Dead Souls", we generally mean only their first volume, completed and published author.
Nikolay Gogol. Engraving after a portrait by Fyodor Moller, 1841
When was it written?
In the famous letter to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye dated October 7, 1835, Gogol asks the poet for a "plot for a comedy", which was a successful precedent - the intrigue also grew, told by the poet. By this time, however, Gogol had already written three chapters of the future poem (their content is unknown, since the manuscript has not been preserved) and, most importantly, the name “Dead Souls” was invented.
"Dead Souls" was conceived as a satirical picaresque novel, a parade of evil caricatures, - as Gogol wrote in the "Author's Confession", "if anyone saw those monsters that came out from under my pen at first for myself, he would definitely shudder." In any case, Pushkin shuddered, who listened to the author’s reading of the first chapters in an early edition that did not reach us, and exclaimed: “God, how sad our Russia!" 1 . Thus, although later Gogol's poem acquired a reputation as an angry verdict on Russian reality, in fact we are already dealing with kind, sweet "Dead Souls".
Gradually, Gogol's idea changed: he came to the conclusion that “many of the vile things are not worth malice; it’s better to show all their insignificance ... ”, and most importantly, instead of random deformities, I decided to depict“ some of those on which our truly Russian, our fundamental properties are more noticeable and deeper, showing precisely the national character in both good and bad. Satire has become an epic, a poem in three parts. Its plan was drawn up in May 1836 in St. Petersburg; On May 1, 1836, The Inspector General premiered there, and already in June Gogol went abroad, where he spent the next 12 years with short breaks. Gogol begins the first part of his main work in the autumn of 1836 in the Swiss city of Vevey, reworking everything he started in St. Petersburg; from there he writes to Zhukovsky about his work: “All Rus' will appear in it!” - and for the first time calls it a poem. The work continues in the winter of 1836/37 in Paris, where Gogol learns about the death of Pushkin - since then, in his work, the writer sees something like Pushkin's spiritual testament. Gogol reads the first chapters of the poem to fellow writers in the winter of 1839/40, during a short visit to Russia. At the beginning of 1841, an almost complete edition of Dead Souls was completed, but Gogol continued to make changes until December, when he came to Moscow to apply for publication (subsequent edits made for censorship reasons are usually not reflected in modern editions).
How is it written?
The most striking feature of Gogol is his violent imagination: all things and phenomena are presented on a grotesque scale, a random situation turns into a farce, a casually dropped word escapes in the form of a detailed image, from which a more economical writer could make a whole story. "Dead Souls" owes much of its comic effect to the naive and important narrator, who, with unflappable thoroughness, describes in great detail sheer nonsense. An example of such a technique is “a surprising in its deliberate, monumentally majestic idiocy, a conversation about wheel" 2 Adamovich G. Report on Gogol // Questions of Literature. 1990. No. 5. S. 145. in the first chapter of the poem (this technique, which made his friends terribly amused, Gogol also used in oral improvisations). Lyrical digressions sharply contrast with this manner, where Gogol moves on to poetic rhetoric, which took a lot from the holy fathers and was colored by folklore. It is believed that because of its richness, Gogol's language is "more untranslatable than any other Russian prose" 3 Svyatopolk-Mirsky D.P. The history of Russian literature from ancient times to 1925. Novosibirsk: Svinin and sons, 2006, p. 241. .
Analyzing Gogol's absurdities and alogisms, Mikhail Bakhtin uses the term "kokalany" (coq-à-l'âne), which literally means "from a rooster to a donkey", and in a figurative sense - verbal nonsense, which is based on a violation of stable semantic, logical, spatio-temporal connections (an example of a kokalan is “an elderberry in the garden, and an uncle in Kiev”). Elements of the "kokalan style" - swearing and curses, feast images, laudatory and swearing nicknames, "unpublished speech spheres" - and indeed, such folk expressions as "fetyuk, haberdashery, mouse foal, jug snout, grandmother", many contemporary Gogol critics found unprintable; they were also offended by the information that “the beast Kuvshinnikov will not let down a single simple woman”, that “he calls it to use it about strawberries”; Nikolai Polevoy Nikolai Alekseevich Polevoy (1796-1846) - literary critic, publisher, writer. From 1825 to 1834 he published the Moscow Telegraph magazine, after the closure of the magazine by the authorities, Polevoy's political views became noticeably more conservative. Since 1841 he published the journal "Russian Messenger". he complains about “Chichikov’s servant, who stinks and carries a stinking atmosphere with him everywhere; on the drop that drips from the boy's nose into the soup; on fleas that were not combed out from the puppy ... on Chichikov, who sleeps naked; to Nozdryov, who comes in a dressing gown without a shirt; on Chichikov's pinching hair from his nose. All this appears in abundance in the pages of Dead Souls - even in the most poetic passage about the trio bird, the narrator exclaims: "Damn it all!" Examples of banquet scenes are innumerable - that dinner at Sobakevich's, that Korobochka's treat, that breakfast at the governor's. It is curious that in his judgments about the artistic nature of Dead Souls, Polevoy actually anticipated Bakhtin's theories (albeit evaluatively negatively): “If we allow crude farces, Italian buffoonery, epic poems inside out (travesti), poems like “ Elisha" Maikov, can one not regret that the wonderful talent of Mr. Gogol is wasted on such creatures!
Goose pen, with which Gogol wrote the second volume of Dead Souls. State Historical Museum
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
What influenced her?
Gogol's work struck his contemporaries with originality - no direct pretexts were sought for him either in domestic literature or in Western literature, which Herzen noted, for example: “Gogol is completely free from foreign influence; he did not know any literature when he had already made himself Name" 4 Herzen A.I. Literature and public opinion after December 14, 1825 // Russian aesthetics and criticism of the 40-50s of the XIX century / Prepared. text, comp., intro. article and note. V. K. Kantor and A. L. Ospovat. M.: Art, 1982. . Both contemporaries and later researchers considered "Dead Souls" as an equal element of the world literary process, drawing parallels with Shakespeare, Dante, Homer; Vladimir Nabokov compared Gogol's poem with Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Joyce's Ulysses and Henry James's Portrait. Mikhail Bakhtin mentions 5 Bakhtin M. M. Rabelais and Gogol (The Art of the Word and Folk Laughter Culture) // Bakhtin M. M. Questions of Literature and Aesthetics. M.: Fiction, 1975. S. 484-495. about the "direct and indirect (through Stern and the French natural school) influence of Rabelais on Gogol", in particular, seeing in the structure of the first volume "an interesting parallel to the fourth book of Rabelais, that is, the journey of Pantagruel".
Svyatopolk-Mirsky Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky (1890-1939) - publicist and literary critic. Before emigrating, Svyatopolk-Mirsky published a collection of poems, participated in the First World War and the Civil War on the side of the White movement. In exile since 1920; there he publishes the History of Russian Literature in English, is fond of Eurasianism and establishes the magazine Versta. In the late 1920s, Svyatopolk-Mirsky became interested in Marxism and in 1932 moved to the USSR. After returning, he signs his literary works as "D. Mirsky". In 1937 he was sent into exile, where he died. notes in the work of Gogol the influence of the tradition of Ukrainian folk and puppet theater, Cossack ballads (“dooms”), comic authors from Molière to vaudevillians of the twenties, the novel of manners, Stern, German romantics, especially Tieck and Hoffmann (under the influence of the latter, Gogol wrote in the gymnasium the poem "Hanz Küchelgarten", which was destroyed by criticism, after which Gogol bought and burned all available copies), French romanticism, led by Hugo, Jules Janin Jules-Gabriel Janin (1804-1874) French writer and critic. For more than forty years he worked as a theater critic for the Journal des Debats. In 1858, a collection of his theatrical feuilletons was published. Janin became famous for his novel The Dead Ass and the Guillotine, which became the program text of the French frenetic school. In a letter to Vera Vyazemskaya, Pushkin calls the novel "charming" and puts Janin above Victor Hugo. and their common teacher Maturin Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824), English writer. From the age of 23 he served as a vicar in the Irish church, he wrote his first novels under a pseudonym. He became famous thanks to the play "Bertrand", it was highly appreciated by Byron and Walter Scott. Maturin's novel Melmoth the Wanderer is considered a classic example of English Gothic literature. , "Iliad" translated by Gnedich. But all this, the researcher concludes, "is only the details of the whole, so original that it could not be expected." Gogol's Russian predecessors are Pushkin and especially Griboyedov (in "Dead Souls" there are many indirect quotations from, for example, an abundance of off-screen characters that are useless for the plot, directly borrowed situations, vernacular, which both Griboedov and Gogol critics reproached).
The parallel of "Dead Souls" with "The Divine Comedy" by Dante is obvious, the three-part structure of which, according to the author's intention, was to be repeated by his poem. Comparison of Gogol with Homer after a fierce controversy became a commonplace already in Gogol's times, but here it is more appropriate to recall not the Iliad, but the Odyssey - a journey from chimera to chimera, at the end of which the hero is waiting for, as a reward, a home; Chichikov does not have his own Penelope, but he often dreams of “a woman, a child.” "Odyssey" translated by Zhukovsky Gogol, according to the recollections of acquaintances, read them aloud, admiring every line.
The vulgarity that Chichikov personifies is one of the main distinguishing properties of the devil, in whose existence, it must be added, Gogol believed much more than in the existence of God
Vladimir NabokovNot without censorship. In general, Gogol's relationship with censorship was rather ambiguous - for example, Nicholas I personally allowed the production, on whom Gogol subsequently counted in various ways - he even asked (and received) material assistance as the first Russian writer. Nevertheless, Dead Souls had to be dealt with: “Never, perhaps, did Gogol use such an amount of worldly experience, heart knowledge, ingratiating affection and feigned anger, as in 1842, when he began printing Dead Souls, - a critic later recalled Pavel Annenkov Pavel Vasilievich Annenkov (1813-1887) - literary critic and publicist, the first biographer and researcher of Pushkin, the founder of Pushkin studies. He was friends with Belinsky, in the presence of Annenkov Belinsky wrote his actual testament - "Letter to Gogol", under Gogol's dictation Annenkov rewrote "Dead Souls". The author of memoirs about the literary and political life of the 1840s and its heroes: Herzen, Stankevich, Bakunin. One of Turgenev's close friends, the writer sent all his latest works to Annenkov before publication. .
At a meeting of the Moscow censorship committee on December 12, 1841, "Dead Souls" were entrusted to the care of the censor Ivan Snegirev Ivan Mikhailovich Snegiryov (1793-1868) - historian, art critic. From 1816 he taught Latin at Moscow University. He was a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, served as a censor for more than 30 years. Snegiryov, one of the first researchers of Russian folklore and popular prints, studied the monuments of ancient Russian architecture. Introduced the term "parsuna" into art criticism, denoting portraiture of the 16th-18th centuries in the technique of icon painting. , who at first found the work "completely well-intentioned", but then for some reason was afraid to let the book go to print on his own and handed it over to his colleagues for consideration. Here, first of all, the name itself caused difficulties, which, according to the censors, meant godlessness (after all, the human soul is immortal) and the condemnation of serfdom (in reality, Gogol never meant either one or the other). They also feared that Chichikov's scam would set a bad example. Faced with a ban, Gogol took the manuscript from the Moscow censorship committee and sent it to St. Petersburg through Belinsky, asking Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, Vyazemsky and his good friend to intervene. Alexander Smirnov-Rosset . Petersburg censor Nikitenko Alexander Vasilievich Nikitenko (1804-1877) - critic, editor, censor. In 1824, Nikitenko, who came from a peasant background, received his freedom; he was able to go to university and pursue an academic career. In 1833, Nikitenko began working as a censor and by the end of his life had risen to the rank of Privy Councilor. From 1839 to 1841 he was the editor of the magazine "Son of the Fatherland", from 1847 to 1848 - the magazine "Contemporary". Nikitenko's memoirs, which were published posthumously, in the late 1880s, gained fame. reacted enthusiastically to the poem, but considered it completely impassable "The Tale of the Captain Kopeikine" 6 Russian antiquity. 1889. No. 8. S. 384-385. . Gogol, who exclusively cherished the Tale and saw no reason to print the poem without this episode, significantly altered it, removing all dangerous places, and finally received permission. "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin" was published until the very revolution in a censored version; Of the significant censorship edits, one should also mention the title, which Nikitenko changed to The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, thus shifting the focus from political satire to a picaresque novel.
The first copies of "Dead Souls" left the printing house on May 21, 1842, two days later Gogol left for border 7 Shenrok V.I. Materials for the biography of Gogol. In 4 volumes. M., 1892-1898. .
Title page of the first edition of the novel, 1842
Cover of Dead Souls, drawn by Gogol for the 1846 edition
How was it received?
With almost unanimous enthusiasm. In general, Gogol had a surprisingly happy fate as a writer: no other classic was so fondled by the Russian reader. With the release of the first volume of Dead Souls, the cult of Gogol finally established itself in Russian society, from Nicholas I to ordinary readers and writers of all camps.
The young Dostoevsky knew Dead Souls by heart. In the "Diary of a Writer" he tells how "he went ... to one of his former comrades; we talked all night with him about "Dead Souls" and read them, for the umpteenth time I don't remember. Then it happened between the youth; two or three will come together: “But shouldn’t we, gentlemen, read Gogol!” - sit down and read, and perhaps all night. Gogol's words came into fashion, young people cut their hair "under Gogol" and copied his vests. Music critic, art critic Vladimir Stasov recalled that the appearance of "Dead Souls" was an event of extraordinary importance for young students, the crowd read the poem aloud so as not to argue about the queue: "... For several days we read and reread this great, unheard of original, incomparable , national and brilliant creation. We were all drunk with delight and amazement. Hundreds and thousands of Gogol's phrases and expressions were immediately known to everyone by heart and went into the general use" 8 Stasov V.V.<Гоголь в восприятии русской молодёжи 30-40-х гг.>// N. V. Gogol in the memoirs of his contemporaries / Ed., Preface. and comment. S. I. Mashinsky. M.: State. publisher artistic lit., 1952, pp. 401-402. .
However, regarding Gogol's words and phrases, opinions differed. Former publisher "Moscow Telegraph" Encyclopedic magazine published by Nikolai Polev from 1825 to 1834. The magazine appealed to a wide range of readers and advocated "education of the middle classes". In the 1830s, the number of subscribers reached five thousand people, a record audience for those times. The magazine was closed by personal decree of Nicholas I because of a negative review of the play by Nestor Kukolnik, which the emperor liked. Nikolai Polevoy was offended by expressions and realities that now look completely innocent: “On every page of the book, you hear: scoundrel, swindler, swindler... all the tavern sayings, abuse, jokes, everything that you can hear enough in the conversations of lackeys, servants, cabbies ”; Gogol's language, Polevoy argued, "can be called a collection of errors against logic and grammar…” 9 Russian messenger. 1842. No. 5-6. S. 41. I agreed with him Faddey Bulgarin Faddey Venediktovich Bulgarin (1789-1859) - critic, writer and publisher, the most odious character in the literary process of the first half of the 19th century. In his youth, Bulgarin fought in the Napoleonic detachment and even participated in the campaign against Russia; from the mid-1820s he was a supporter of Russian reactionary policy and an agent of the Third Section. Bulgarin's novel "Ivan Vyzhigin" was a great success and is considered one of the first picaresque novels in Russian literature. Bulgarin published the Severny Arkhiv magazine, the first private newspaper with a political section, Severnaya Pchela, and the first theatrical almanac, Russkaya Talia. : “In no other Russian work is there so much bad taste, dirty pictures and evidence of complete ignorance of the Russian language as in this poem…” 10 Northern bee. 1842. No. 119. Belinsky objected to this that although Gogol's language "is definitely wrong, often sins against grammar", but "Gogol has something that makes you not notice the carelessness of his language - there is a syllable", and pricked the prim reader, who is offended in the press by which is characteristic of him in life, not understanding "a poem based on the pathos of reality as it is." At the suggestion of Belinsky, the literary legislator of the forties, Gogol was recognized as the first Russian writer - for a long time, everything fresh and talented that grew after him in literature was automatically attributed by critics to the Gogol school.
Before the appearance of "Dead Souls", Gogol's position in literature was still vague - "not a single poet in Rus' had such a strange fate as Gogol: even people who knew him by heart did not dare to see a great writer in him creations" 11 Belinsky V. G. The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls. // Domestic notes. 1842. T. XXIII. No. 7. Det. VI "Bibliographic Chronicle". pp. 1-12. ; now he has moved from the category of comic writers to the status of an undoubted classic.
Gogol became, as it were, the progenitor of all new literature and a bone of contention for literary parties that could not divide the main Russian writer among themselves. In the year the poem was published, Herzen wrote in his diary: "Talk about Dead Souls." Slavophiles and anti-Slavs split into parties. Slavophiles No. 1 say that this is the apotheosis of Rus', our Iliad, and they praise it, next, others are furious, they say that Rus' is anathema here and they scold it for it. The anti-Slavs also bifurcated in reverse. Great is the dignity of a work of art when it can elude any one-sided view. Sergei Aksakov, who left extensive and extremely valuable memoirs about Gogol and prompted others to do the same immediately after the writer's death, exaggerates Gogol's closeness to the Slavophiles and is silent about Gogol's relationship with Belinsky and his camp (however, Gogol himself tried not to inform Aksakov about these relationships). Belinsky did not lag behind: “Gogol's influence on Russian literature was enormous. Not only all young talents rushed to the path indicated by him, but also some writers, who had already gained fame, went along the same path, leaving their former one. Hence the appearance of the school, which its opponents thought to humiliate with the name natural. Dostoevsky, Grigorovich, Goncharov, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin - it is difficult to remember which of the Russian writers of the second half of the 19th century Gogol did not influence.
Following the descendant of the Ethiopians Pushkin, a native of Little Russia, Gogol for a long time became the main Russian writer and prophet. The artist Alexander Ivanov depicted Gogol on the famous canvas "The Appearance of Christ to the People" in the form of a figure standing closest to Jesus. Already during the life of Gogol and soon after his death, German, Czech, English, French translations of the poem appeared.
In the 1920s and 30s, Dead Souls was adapted by Mikhail Bulgakov. In his feuilleton "The Adventures of Chichikov", the heroes of Gogol's poem ended up in Russia in the 20s and Chichikov made a dizzying career, becoming a billionaire. In the early 1930s, Bulgakov's play "Dead Souls" was successfully staged at the Moscow Art Theater; he also created a screenplay, which, however, was not used by anyone. Gogol's poem resonated in literature even more indirectly: for example, Yesenin's poem "I don't regret, I don't call, I don't cry" (1921) was written under the impression of the lyrical introduction to the sixth - Plyushkin - chapter of "Dead Souls", which the poet himself admitted (on this is hinted at by the lines "Oh, my lost freshness" and "I have now become more stingy in desires").
The names of some of Gogol's landowners became household names: Lenin accused the populists of "Manilov projecting", Mayakovsky titled a poem about the greedy layman "Plyushkin". The passage about the trinity bird has been memorized by schoolchildren for decades.
Gogol's poem was screened for the first time back in 1909 in Khanzhonkov's studio; in 1960, the film-play "Dead Souls" based on the play by Bulgakov was shot by Leonid Trauberg; in 1984, a five-episode film starring Alexander Kalyagin was directed by Mikhail Schweitzer. Of the latest interpretations, we can recall The Case of the Dead Souls directed by Pavel Lungin and the high-profile theatrical production by Kirill Serebrennikov at the Gogol Center in 2013.
Fragment of Alexander Ivanov's painting "The Appearance of Christ to the People". 1837–1857. Tretyakov Gallery. Ivanov wrote from Gogol the face of the person closest to Jesus
Was Chichikov's scam feasible in practice?
No matter how fantastic the enterprise with "dead souls" seemed, it was not only feasible, but formally did not violate the laws and even had precedents.
Deceased serfs who are registered with the landowner revision tale A document with the results of the taxable population census conducted in Russia in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. The fairy tales indicated the name, patronymic, surname, age of the owner of the yard and members of his family. A total of ten such audits were carried out. , for the state were alive until the next census and were subject to a poll tax. Chichikov's calculation was that the landlords would only be happy to get rid of the extra dues and give him dead (but on paper alive) peasants for pennies, which he would then be able to pawn. The only hitch was that the peasants could not be bought or mortgaged without land (this is perhaps an anachronism: this practice was prohibited only in 1841, and the action of the first volume of Dead Souls takes place a decade earlier), but Chichikov allowed it easy: “Why, I’ll buy on the withdrawal, on the withdrawal; Now the land in the Tauride and Kherson provinces is given away for free, just populate.
The plot of the poem, given to Gogol by Pushkin (as Gogol writes in The Author's Confession), was taken from real life. As writes Pyotr Bartenev Pyotr Ivanovich Bartenev (1829-1912) - historian, literary critic. From 1859 to 1873 he was the head of the Chertkovo Library, the first public library in Moscow. He wrote monographs on Pushkin, along with Pavel Annenkov, he is considered the founder of Pushkin studies. Since 1863 he published the historical journal "Russian Archive". As a historian, he advised Tolstoy in his work on War and Peace. in a memoir note Vladimir Sollogub Vladimir Alexandrovich Sollogub (1813-1882) - writer. He served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published secular stories in magazines. The most famous work of Sollogub was the story "Tarantas", published in 1845. He had the title of court historiographer. Sollogub was a close friend of Pushkin: in 1836 a duel could take place between them, but the parties reconciled, Sollogub acted as Pushkin's second in the first duel with Dantes. : “In Moscow, Pushkin was on the run with a friend. There was also a certain P. (an old dandy). Pointing to him to Pushkin, a friend told about him how he bought up dead souls for himself, pawned them and received a big profit. Pushkin liked it very much. “You could make a novel out of this,” he said casually. This was before 1828 of the year" 12 Russian archive. 1865. S. 745. .
This could be superimposed on another plot that interested Pushkin during his stay in Chisinau. Peasants fled en masse to Bessarabia at the beginning of the 19th century. To hide from the police, runaway serfs often assumed the names of the dead. The city of Bender was especially famous for this practice, whose population was called the "immortal society": for many years there was not a single death recorded there. As the investigation showed, in Bendery it was accepted as a rule: the dead "do not be excluded from society", and their names are given to newly arrived fugitive peasants.
Alas! fat people know how to handle their affairs better in this world than thin ones
Nikolay Gogol
In general, fraudulent audit lists were not uncommon. A distant relative of Gogol, Marya Grigorievna Anisimo-Yanovskaya, was sure that the idea of the poem was given to the writer by her own uncle Kharlampy Pivinsky. Having five children and yet only 200 acres A tithe is a unit of land area equal to 1.09 hectares. 200 acres make up 218 hectares. land and 30 souls of peasants, the landowner made ends meet thanks to the distillery. Suddenly there was a rumor that only landowners with at least 50 souls would be allowed to smoke wine. Small-scale nobles began to grieve, and Kharlampy Petrovich “went to Poltava, and paid dues for his dead peasants, as if for the living. And since there weren’t enough of his own, and even with the dead, far to fifty, he took vodka in a cart, and went to neighbors and bought dead souls from them for this vodka, wrote them down for himself and, having become the owner of fifty souls on paper, until his death he smoked wine and gave this theme to Gogol, who visited Fedunki, Pivinsky's estate, 17 versts from Yanovshchina Another name for the Gogol estate is Vasilievka. ; besides, the whole Mirgorod region knew about dead souls Pivinsky" 13 Russian antiquity. 1902. No. 1. S. 85-86. .
Another local anecdote recalls a schoolmate of Gogol: “In Nizhyn ... there was a certain K-ach, a Serb; of enormous growth, very handsome, with the longest mustaches, a terrible explorer - somewhere he bought the land on which he is located - it is said in the deed of sale - 650 souls; the amount of land is not indicated, but the boundaries are definitive. ... What happened? This land was a neglected cemetery. This same case told 14 literary heritage. T. 58. M.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1952. S. 774. Gogol abroad Prince N. G. Repnin Nikolai Grigorievich Repnin-Volkonsky (1778-1845) - military man. Participated in the battle of Austerlitz, after which he was captured - Napoleon I sent Repnin to Alexander I with a proposal to enter into negotiations. During the War of 1812 he commanded a cavalry division. He was the governor-general of Saxony and Little Russia. Since 1828, a member of the State Council. Due to accusations of misappropriation of public money, he resigned. »
Probably, Gogol listened to this story in response to a request to provide him with information about various “incidents” “that could happen when buying dead souls,” with which he pestered all his relatives and acquaintances - perhaps this story was echoed in the second volume of the poem in General Betrishchev’s remark: “To give you dead souls? Yes, for such an invention, I give them to you with land, with housing! Take over the whole cemetery!”
Despite the thorough research carried out by the writer, inconsistencies remained in Chichikov's plan, which Sergei pointed out to Gogol after the release of the poem. Aksakov 15 Correspondence of N. V. Gogol. In 2 volumes. T. 2. M .: Khudozh. literature, 1988. S. 23-24. : “I scold myself very much that I overlooked one thing, and insisted on the other a little: the peasants are sold with their families for withdrawal, and Chichikov refused the female; without a power of attorney issued in a government office, it is impossible to sell foreign peasants, and the chairman cannot be at the same time both a trustee and someone present in this case. The short-sighted Chichikov did not buy women and children, apparently simply because their nominal price was lower than for men.
Pyotr Boklevsky. Chichikov. Illustration for "Dead Souls". 1895
Why is "Dead Souls" a poem?
Calling his main work a poem, Gogol, first of all, had in mind that this is not a story and not a novel in the understanding of his time. Such an unusual genre definition is clarified by Gogol's sketches for the unrealized "Educational Book of Literature for the Russian Youth", where Gogol, analyzing different types of literature, "the greatest, most complete, huge and versatile of all creatures" calls an epic that can cover an entire historical era, the life of a nation or even of all mankind, - as an example of such an epic, Gogol cites the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he loved in the translations of Gnedich and Zhukovsky, respectively. At the same time, the novel, as we intuitively call "Dead Souls" today, "is an essay too conventional", the main thing in it is intrigue: all events in it must directly relate to the fate of the protagonist, the author cannot "move the characters of the novel quickly and in multitude, in the form of passing phenomena”; the novel "does not take a lifetime, but a wonderful event in life" - and after all, Gogol's goal was precisely to create a kind of Russian cosmos.
Konstantin Aksakov immediately declared Gogol a Russian Homer in the press, provoking Belinsky's ridicule, which in reality was not entirely fair. Many of Gogol's tricks that confuse critics become understandable precisely in the Homeric context: for example, a lyrical digression, for which the narrator leaves Chichikov on the road in order to return to him just as suddenly, or detailed comparisons that parody - in Nabokov's words - Homer's branching parallels. Gentlemen in black tailcoats at a party at the governor's, scurrying around the ladies, Gogol compares with a swarm of flies - and from this comparison a whole living picture grows: a portrait of an old housekeeper who chop sugar on a summer day. In the same way, comparing Sobakevich's face with a gourd gourd, Gogol recalls that balalaikas are made from such pumpkins - and out of nowhere the image of a balalaika player grows up in front of us, "a blinker and a dandy, and winking and whistling at white-breasted and white-necked girls" and absolutely no role not playing in the plot of the poem.
In the same epic piggy bank - sudden and inappropriate enumerations of names and details that are not related to the action: Chichikov, wanting to entertain the governor's daughter, tells her pleasant things that "he had already happened to say in similar cases in different places, namely: in the Simbirsk province at Sofron's Ivanovich Bespechny, where his daughter Adelaide Sofronovna was then with her three sisters-in-law: Marya Gavrilovna, Alexandra Gavrilovna and Adelgeida Gavrilovna; at Fedor Fedorovich Perekroev in the Ryazan province; at Frol Vasilyevich Pobedonosny in the Penza province and at his brother Pyotr Vasilyevich, where his sister-in-law Katerina Mikhailovna and her great-sisters Roza Fedorovna and Emilia Fedorovna were; in the Vyatka province with Pyotr Varsonofyevich, where his daughter-in-law's sister Pelageya Yegorovna was with her niece Sofya Rostislavna and two half-sisters - Sophia Alexandrovna and Maklatura Alexandrovna ”- than not the Homeric list of ships.
In addition, the genre definition of "Dead Souls" refers to the work of Dante, which is called the "Divine Comedy", but is a poem. The three-part structure of the Divine Comedy was supposedly to be repeated by Dead Souls, but only Hell was completed.
Revision tale of 1859 for the village of Novoye Kataevo, Orenburg province
Map of Kherson province. 1843
Why is Chichikov mistaken for Napoleon?
Officials of the city of N. are anxiously discussing the similarity between Chichikov and Napoleon, discovering that the most charming Pavel Ivanovich turned out to be some kind of sinister rogue: Chichikov. Such a suspicion - along with the maker of forged banknotes, an official of the Governor-General's Office (that is, in fact, an auditor), a noble robber "like Rinalda Rinaldina Robber hero from Christian August Vulpius' novel Rinaldo Rinaldini, published in 1797. ”- looks like ordinary Gogol absurdism, but it did not appear in the poem by chance.
Also in the "Old World Landowners" someone "told that the Frenchman secretly agreed with the Englishman to release Bonaparte again into Russia." Such talk may have been fueled by rumors of the "hundred days," that is, of Napoleon's escape from the island of Elba and his second brief reign in France in 1815. This, by the way, is the only place in the poem where the time of the Dead Souls action is specified: “However, it must be remembered that all this happened shortly after the glorious expulsion of the French. At this time, all our landowners, officials, merchants, inmates and every literate and even illiterate people became, at least for eight whole years, sworn politicians. Thus, Chichikov travels through the Russian outback in the early 1820s (he is older than both Onegin and Pechorin), or rather, probably in 1820 or 1821, since Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, after which the possibility of suspecting him in Chichikovo naturally disappeared.
The signs of the times also include some indirect signs, such as the postmaster's favorite "Lancaster School of Mutual Education" A peer-to-peer learning system in which older students teach younger ones. Invented in Great Britain in 1791 by Joseph Lancaster. The Russian "Society of Schools for Mutual Education" was founded in 1819. Many members of the secret societies were champions of the Lancastrian system; Thus, in 1820, the Decembrist V.F. Raevsky was under investigation for “harmful propaganda among the soldiers” precisely in connection with his teaching activities. , which Griboyedov mentions in Woe from Wit as a characteristic hobby of the Decembrist circle.
Bonaparte, who suddenly appeared incognito in a provincial Russian city, is a common folklore motif from the time of the Napoleonic Wars. In the Old Notebook, Pyotr Vyazemsky cites an anecdote about Alexei Mikhailovich Pushkin (the poet’s second cousin and a great wit), who served in the police service under Prince Yuri Dolgoruky during the war of 1806-1807: “At the post station of one of the remote provinces, he noticed in the room the caretaker's portrait of Napoleon, pasted to the wall. "Why are you keeping this scoundrel at your place?" “And then, Your Excellency,” he answers, “if it’s not equal, Bonaparte, under a false name or with a fake traveller, will arrive at my station, I will immediately recognize him, my dear, by his portrait, I will seize him, tie him up, and present him to the authorities.” "Oh, that's different!" Pushkin said.
"Oh, you're such a muzzle!" Chichikov (Alexander Kalyagin)
Or maybe Chichikov is a devil?
“I call the devil directly the devil, I don’t give him a magnificent costume at all à la Byron and I know that he goes to tailcoat" 16 Aksakov S. T. Collected works in 5 volumes. T. 3. M.: Pravda, 1966. S. 291-292. , - Gogol wrote to Sergei Aksakov from Frankfurt in 1844. This idea was developed in the article “Gogol and the Devil” by Dmitry Merezhkovsky: “The main strength of the devil is the ability to seem not what he is.<...>Gogol was the first to see the devil without a mask, he saw his true face, terrible not for its extraordinaryness, but for its commonness, vulgarity; the first to understand that the face of the devil is not distant, alien, strange, fantastic, but the closest, familiar, generally real “human ... almost our own face in those moments when we do not dare to be ourselves and agree to be “like everyone else”.
In this light, the sparks on Chichikov's lingonberry tailcoat shine ominously (Chichikov, as we remember, generally kept “brown and reddish colors with a spark” in his clothes; in the second volume, the merchant sells him a cloth shade of “Navarin smoke with flames”).
Pavel Ivanovich is devoid of distinctive features: he is “not handsome, but not bad-looking, neither too fat nor too thin; one cannot say that he is old, but not so much that he is too young ”and at the same time, like a real tempter, he charms everyone, speaking his language with everyone: he is sentimental with Manilov, he is businesslike with Sobakevich, he is simply rude with Korobochka, he knows how to support any conversation: “Whether it was about a horse factory, he also talked about a horse factory ... whether they interpreted it with regard to the investigation carried out by the Treasury, he showed that he was not unknown to judicial tricks; whether there was an argument about the billiard game - and in the billiart game he did not miss; whether they talked about virtue, and he talked about virtue very well, even with tears in his eyes. Chichikov buys human souls not only in a business sense, but also in a figurative one - for everyone he becomes a mirror, which captivates.
In a lyrical digression, the author directly asks the reader: “And which of you ... in moments of solitary conversations with yourself, will deepen this heavy request into the inside of your own soul:“ Is there any part of Chichikov in me too? Yes, no matter how!” - whereas in a neighbor everyone is immediately ready to recognize Chichikov.
Is there anything else needed? Maybe you're used to, my father, for someone to scratch your heels at night. My dead man couldn't fall asleep without it
Nikolay Gogol
And looking into this mirror, the inspector of the medical board turns pale, thinking that under dead souls of course, the sick who died in the infirmaries, because he did not take the necessary measures; the chairman turns pale, having acted as attorney in the deal with Plyushkin contrary to the law; officials turn pale, covering up the recent murder of merchants: “All of a sudden they found in themselves such sins that they didn’t even exist.”
Chichikov himself constantly admires himself in the mirror, pats himself on the chin and comments approvingly: “Oh, you, such a muzzle!” - but the reader will never come across a description of his face, with the exception of an apophatic one, although other heroes of the poem are described in great detail. He does not seem to be reflected in the mirrors - like evil spirits in popular beliefs. In the figure of Chichikov, that famous Gogol devilry is concentrated, on which “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” are built and which is present in Dead Souls, although not so clearly, but undoubtedly. Mikhail Bakhtin discovers in the basis of "Dead Souls" "forms of a cheerful (carnival) walk through the underworld, through the land of death.<…>Not without reason, of course, the afterlife moment is present in the very concept and title of Gogol's novel ("Dead Souls"). The world of "Dead Souls" is the world of a cheerful underworld.<...>We will find in it the scum, and the junk of the carnival "hell", and a number of images that are the implementation of swear words. metaphors" 17 Bakhtin M. M. Rabelais and Gogol (The Art of the Word and Folk Laughter Culture) // Bakhtin M. M. Issues of Literature and Aesthetics: Studies of Different Years. M.: Artist. lit., 1975. S. 484-495. .
In this context, Chichikov is a carnival, farcical devil, insignificant, comical and opposed to the sublime romantic evil that is often found in Gogol's contemporary literature ("the spirit of denial, the spirit of doubt" - Pushkin's demon - appears in Gogol in the form of a pleasant lady in all respects, who " was somewhat materialistic, inclined to denial and doubt, and rejected quite a lot in life”).
This cheerful demonism notes 18 researcher Elena Smirnova, thickens by the end of the first volume in the picture of a “rebellious” city, where evil spirits alarmed by Chichikov climbed out of all corners: “... And everything that is, rose. Like a whirlwind, hitherto, it seemed, the dormant city shot up! Crawled out of the holes all the tyuryuki and bobaki ...<…>Some Sysoy Pafnutevich and Makdonald Karlovich appeared, whom they had never heard of; in the drawing-rooms stuck up some long, tall man with a shot through his hand, of such a tall stature that he had not even been seen. Covered droshkys, unknown rulers, rattles, wheel whistles appeared on the streets - and porridge was brewed.
Manilov (Yuri Bogatyrev)
Pyotr Boklevsky. Manilov. Illustration for "Dead Souls". 1895
Pyotr Boklevsky. Box. Illustration for "Dead Souls". 1895
Why is the narrator in Dead Souls so afraid of ladies?
As soon as the narrator touches on the ladies in his reasoning, horror attacks him: “The ladies of the city of N. were ... no, I can’t in any way; timidity is felt for sure. What was most remarkable about the ladies of the city of N. ... It’s even strange, the pen does not rise at all, as if some kind of lead was sitting in it.
These assurances should not be taken at face value - after all, right there we find such, for example, a bold description: “Everything was invented and provided for with extraordinary prudence; neck, shoulders were open just as much as necessary, and no further; each bared her possessions until she felt, by her own conviction, that they were capable of destroying a person; everything else was hidden with unusual taste: either some light tie made of ribbon or a scarf lighter than a cake, known as a kiss, ethereally hugged and wrapped around the neck, or small jagged walls of thin cambric, known under the name of modesty. These modesty hid in front and behind that which could no longer cause death to a person, but meanwhile they made me suspect that it was precisely there that the very death was.
Nevertheless, the narrator has fears, and not groundless. Literary critic Elena Smirnova noticed that the conversation between “a lady pleasant in every respect” and “a lady simply pleasant” in “Dead Souls” repeats close to the text the twittering of the princesses with Natalya Dmitrievna Gorich in the third act “Woe from Wit” (“ 1st princess: What a beautiful style! 2nd princess: What folds! 1st princess: Fringed. Natalya Dmitrievna: No, if you could see my satin tulle... "- etc.) and plays the same constructive role in action 19 Smirnova E. A. Gogol's poem "Dead Souls". L.: Nauka, 1987. .
In both cases, from the discussion of fashion, "eyes and paws", the ladies go directly to gossip and, having risen in a "general rebellion" (in Griboyedov) or heading "each in their own direction to rebel the city" (in Gogol), they start a rumor that destroyed the life of the main hero: in one case about madness, in the other - about the insidious plan to take away the governor's daughter. In the ladies of the city of N. Gogol partly portrayed the matriarchal terror of Famus Moscow.
We do not know what will happen in the other two parts of the poem; but still in the foreground are people who abuse their positions and profit from illegal means
Konstantin Masalsky
A striking exception is the governor's daughter. In general, this is the only character in the first volume of the poem that the narrator frankly admires - her face, like a fresh egg, and thin ears, glowing with warm sunlight. She produces an unusual effect on Chichikov: for the first time he is confused, captivated, forgets about profit and the need to please everyone and, “turning into a poet”, argues that your Rousseau: “She is now like a child, everything in her is simple: she will say that she he will, he will laugh, where he wants to laugh.
This bright and completely silent female image was to be incarnated in the second volume of Dead Souls in a positive ideal - Ulinka. We know Gogol's attitude towards women from his "Selected passages from correspondence with friends", where he published under the title "Woman in the Light" variations on his real letters to Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova (maiden name - Rosset; 1809-1882) - maid of honor of the imperial court. She became a lady-in-waiting to Empress Maria Feodorovna in 1826. In 1832 she married an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nikolai Smirnov. She was friends with Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Odoevsky, Lermontov and Gogol. , which is often called the "hidden love" of Gogol, who has not been seen in love affairs all his life. The ideal woman, worked out by Gogol from his youth under the influence of German romantics, is ethereal, almost silent and obviously inactive - she "revives" a society infected with "moral fatigue", by her mere presence and her beauty, which not without reason strikes even the most hardened souls: "If already one senseless whim of a beauty has been the cause of world upheavals and forced the most intelligent people to do stupid things, what would happen then if this whim were comprehended and directed to good? (As we can see, women's power is ambivalent here too: the governor's daughter "could be a miracle, or it might turn out to be rubbish.")
Answering the question, "what should a young, educated, beautiful, wealthy, moral and still not satisfied with her secular uselessness of a woman do", notices 20 Tertz A. (Sinyavsky A.D.) In the shadow of Gogol // Collected. op. in 2 vols. T. 2. M.: Start, 1992. S. 20. Abram Tertz, Gogol "does not call her either to cut frogs, or to abolish the corset, or even to bear children, or to refrain from childbearing." “Gogol does not require anything from her, except for what she already has as a woman - neither moralizing, nor social activities. Her good task is to be herself, showing everyone her beauty" 21 Tertz A. (Sinyavsky A.D.) In the shadow of Gogol // Collected. op. in 2 vols. T. 2. M.: Start, 1992. S. 3-336. . It is understandable why “Woman in the Light” is ridiculed by the vivisector of frogs, Turgenev’s Bazarov, who wavered in his nihilism under the influence of love: “... I feel very dirty, as if I had read Gogol’s letters to the Kaluga governor’s wife” (the wife of the Kaluga governor was just Alexandra Smirnova) .
The governor’s daughter, who “only turned white and came out transparent and bright from a muddy and opaque crowd,” is not in vain the only bright character in the poem: she is the reincarnation of Beatrice, who must lead the hero out of the Dante hell of the first volume, and this transformation inspires awe in the author.
Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Who is really meant by dead souls?
Despite the fact that this phrase has a direct meaning - dead serfs, who were called "souls" (just like a herd of horses is counted by "heads"), the figurative meaning is also clearly read in the novel - people who are dead in a spiritual sense. Announcing the future positive heroes of his poem, “a husband endowed with divine valor, or a wonderful Russian girl, which cannot be found anywhere in the world, with all the wondrous beauty of the female soul,” the author adds: “All the virtuous people of other tribes will appear dead before them, as dead book before the living word! Nevertheless, contemporaries were inclined to oppose these living, Russian and popular ideals not to foreigners, but to officials and landowners, reading this as a socio-political satire.
Gogol describes an anecdotal discussion of the poem in the censorship committee in a letter to Pletnev in 1842: “As soon as Golokhvastov, who took the place of president, heard the name “Dead Souls”, he shouted in the voice of an ancient Roman: “No, I will never allow this: the soul is immortal; there can be no dead soul, the author is arming himself against immortality. Finally, the smart president could understand that it was about Revizh souls. As soon as he got the idea ... there was even more confusion. “No,” shouted the chairman, followed by half of the censors, “this can’t even be allowed, even if there was nothing in the manuscript, and there was only one word: Revizh soul, this can’t be allowed, it means against serfdom.” A somewhat limited interpretation of Golokhvastov, it should be noted, was shared by many admirers of Gogol. Herzen turned out to be somewhat more perceptive, who saw in the poem not so much social caricatures as a gloomy insight about the human soul: “This title itself carries something terrifying in itself. And otherwise he could not name; not revizsky - dead souls, but all these Nozdryovs, Manilovs and tutti quanti - these are dead souls, and we meet them at every step.<…>Don't we all, after our youth, one way or another, lead one of the lives of Gogol's heroes? Herzen assumes that Lensky in "Eugene Onegin" would have turned into Manilov over the years if its author had not been "shot" in time, and laments that Chichikov is "one active person ... and that limited rogue" did not meet on his way a "moral landowner good-hearted, old-timer”- this is exactly what was supposed to happen, according to Gogol’s plan, in the second volume of Dead Souls.
The unfortunate fate of the second volume, which Gogol tortured for ten years and burned twice, may be partly due to the fact that Gogol could not find satisfactory "living souls" in the very reality, the ugly sides of which he showed in the first volume (where he describes his landowners , in fact, not without sympathy). Sobakevich, Manilov and Nozdryov, he opposes not the Russian people, as was commonly believed in Soviet literary criticism, but some epic or fairy-tale heroes. The most poetic descriptions of Russian peasants in the poem refer to the peasants of Sobakevich, whom he paints as living in order to fill the price (and after him Chichikov embarks on a fantasy of Russian prowess): “Yes, of course, the dead,” said Sobakevich, as if coming to his senses and remembering that they were in fact already dead, and then he added: “However, even then to say: which of these people who are now considered living? What are these people? flies, not people.
Nozdrev (Vitaly Shapovalov)
Pyotr Boklevsky. Nozdryov. Illustration for "Dead Souls". 1895
Why are there so many different foods in Gogol's poem?
First of all, Gogol himself was very fond of eating and regaling others.
Sergey Aksakov recalls, for example, with what artistic rapture Gogol cooked pasta for his friends with his own hands: “Standing on his feet in front of the bowl, he rolled up the cuffs and with haste, and at the same time with accuracy, first put a lot of butter and began to stir pasta with two sauce spoons, then he added salt, then pepper, and finally cheese, and continued to stir for a long time. It was impossible to look at Gogol without laughter and surprise. Another memoirist, Mikhail Maksimovich Mikhail Alexandrovich Maksimovich (1804-1873) - historian, botanist, philologist. Since 1824 he was director of the Botanical Garden of Moscow University, headed the Department of Botany. Since 1834 he was appointed the first rector of the Imperial University of St. Vladimir in Kyiv, but left the post a year later. In 1858 he was secretary of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. He collected Ukrainian folk songs, studied the history of ancient Russian literature. He corresponded with Gogol. , recalls: “At the stations he bought milk, skimmed cream and very skillfully made butter out of them with a wooden spoon. In this occupation he found as much pleasure as in picking flowers.
Mikhail Bakhtin, analyzing the Rabelaisian nature of Gogol's work, notes about "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka": "Food, drink and sex life in these stories are of a festive, carnival-Shrovetide character." A hint of this folklore layer can also be seen in the feast scenes of Dead Souls. Korobochka, wanting to appease Chichikov, puts various pies and pies on the table, of which Chichikov pays the main attention to pancakes, dipping them three at a time into melted butter and praising them. Pancakes on Maslenitsa are appeased by carolers, personifying evil spirits, and Chichikov, who arrived “God knows where, and even at night” and buys up the dead, in the eyes of the ingenuous “mother landowner” looks like evil spirits.
Food serves to characterize the landowners, as well as their wives, villages and furnishings, and it is often behind the food in Gogol's caricatures that sympathetic human features appear. Treating Chichikov with "mushrooms, pies, quick thinkers Fried eggs baked with bread and ham. , shanishki A diminutive form of the word "shangi" - round pies, a traditional dish of Russian cuisine. In Gogol's notebook - "a kind of cheesecake, a little less." However, shangi, unlike cheesecakes, is not made sweet. , bucklers "Dumplings, pancakes" (from Gogol's notebook). , pancakes, cakes with all sorts of seasonings: seasoning with onion, seasoning with poppy seeds, seasoning with cottage cheese, seasoning with shots Smeltok is a small lake fish. ”, The box reminds the unconditionally sweet author Pulcheria Ivanovna from “Old World Landowners” with her shortbreads with bacon, salted mushrooms, various dried fish, dumplings with berries and pies - with poppy seeds, with cheese or with cabbage and buckwheat porridge (“these are those that Afanasy Ivanovich loves very much. And in general, she is a good housewife, she takes care of the peasants, she cordially spreads feather beds to a suspicious night guest and offers to scratch her heels.
Sobakevich, who in one sitting kills a side of lamb or a whole sturgeon, but he won’t take a frog or an oyster (the food of “Germans and French”) into his mouth, “at least sprinkle it with sugar”, reminds at this moment an epic Russian hero like Dobrynya Nikitich, who drank at once " a glass of green wine in one and a half buckets, ”it was not without reason that his late father used to go after a bear alone; the Russian bear is not at all a pejorative definition in Gogol's world.
Nozdryov was in some respects a historical person. Not a single meeting he attended was without a story. Some kind of story was bound to happen: either the gendarmes will lead him by the arms from the gendarme hall, or they will be forced to push out their own friends
Nikolay Gogol
Manilov, who built himself a “temple of solitary reflection” and saying “You” to the coachman, offers Chichikov “simply, according to Russian custom, cabbage soup, but from the bottom of his 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 style and thoughts to sugar cloying,” Manilov, as we recall, was not without pleasantness, however, “in this the pleasantness seemed too much transferred to the sugar. Dinner in Manilovka, as usual, is not described in detail - but we know that Manilov and his wife now and then brought each other “either a piece of an apple, or a candy, or a nut and spoke in a touchingly tender voice expressing perfect love: “Open up, darling , my mouth, I will put this piece for you, ”thus showing, although grotesque, but the only example of conjugal love in the entire poem.
Only from Nozdryov Chichikov leaves hungry - his dishes are burnt or undercooked, made by the cook from anything: “if there was pepper near him, he poured pepper, if he caught cabbage, he popped cabbage, stuffed milk, ham, peas, in a word, go ahead »; on the other hand, Nozdryov drinks a lot - and also some kind of utter rubbish: Madeira, which the merchants "mercilessly filled with rum, and sometimes poured aqua regia into it", some kind of "Bourgognon and champagne together", rowanberry, in which "fusel was heard in all its strength."
Finally, Plyushkin, the only tragic figure in Dead Souls whose story of transformation is told to us by the author, thereby inevitably arousing sympathy, does not eat or drink at all. His treat - a carefully preserved rusk from an Easter cake brought by his daughter - is a rather transparent metaphor for the future resurrection. In Selected Places, Gogol wrote: “Call ... to a beautiful, but dormant person. ... To save his poor soul ... he insensibly puts on flesh and has already become all flesh, and there is almost no soul in him.<…>Oh, if you could tell him what my Plyushkin must say if I get to the third volume of Dead Souls!
Gogol did not have to describe this revival: there is a tragic paradox in that in the last days Gogol fasted cruelly, as it is believed, having starved himself to death, renouncing food and laughter - that is, turning himself into Plyushkin in some spiritual sense.
Roasted piglet. 19th century engraving
Chichikov (Alexander Kalyagin)
Why did Gogol decide to make his hero a scoundrel?
The author himself motivated his choice as follows: “They turned a virtuous person into a workhorse, and there is no writer who would not ride him, urging him with a whip and anything else ... they exhausted a virtuous person to the point that now there is not even a shadow of virtue on him, and only the ribs and skin instead of the body remained ... they hypocritically call for a virtuous person ... they do not respect a virtuous person. No, it's time to finally hide the scoundrel."
For Chichikov alone, there are no particular meannesses, hardly anyone suffered from his scams (except indirectly - the prosecutor died of fright). Nabokov calls him "a vulgar vulgar caliber", while noting: "Trying to buy the dead in a country where they legally bought and mortgaged living people, Chichikov hardly seriously sinned from the point of view of morality."
For all the caricature vulgarity of Chichikov, he is, after all, the Russian who loves fast driving, in an apologetic passage about the troika. It was he who had to go through the crucible of trials and be spiritually reborn in the third volume.
The prerequisite for such a revival is the only property that distinguishes Chichikov from all other heroes of Dead Souls: he is active. Worldly failures do not extinguish the energy in him, “activity did not die in his head; there everything wanted to build something and was only waiting for the plan. In this regard, he is the same Russian man who “went ... even to Kamchatka, give only warm mittens, he pats his hands, an ax in his hands, and went to cut himself a new hut.”
Of course, his activity is so far only acquisitive, and not creative, in which the author sees his main vice. Nevertheless, it is precisely and only Chichikov’s energy that moves the action from a place - from the movement of his trinity bird “everything flies: miles fly, merchants fly towards them on the rays of their wagons, a forest flies on both sides with dark formations of firs and pines”, all of Rus' rushes somewhere.
The whole city is like this: a scammer sits on a scammer and drives a scammer. All Christ sellers. There is only one decent person there - the prosecutor, and even that, to tell the truth, is a pig
Nikolay Gogol
All Russian classics dreamed of an energetic, active Russian hero, but, it seems, they did not really believe in his existence. Mother Russian laziness, who was born before us, was perceived by them as the source of all evils and sorrows - but at the same time as the basis of the national character. An example of a good owner, immersed in vigorous activity, Gogol displays in the second volume of "Dead Souls", it is no coincidence that he endows him with the unpronounceable and obviously foreign (Greek) surname Kostanjoglo: "A Russian person ... cannot do without an urge ... So he will doze off, and he will turn sour." The next famous businessman in Russian literature, described by Goncharov in Oblomov, is the semi-German Andrey Stolz, while the undoubtedly more handsome Oblomov is the direct heir of Gogol’s “lump, couch potato, boba” Tentetnikov, who in his youth hatched plans for a vigorous housekeeping, and then settled in a dressing gown on the couch. Complaining about Russian laziness, both Gogol and his followers did not seem to believe in the possibility of eradicating it without the participation of businesslike foreigners - but contrary to reason, they could not overcome the feeling that businesslikeness is an unspiritual, vulgar and vile property. The word "mean" in the archaic sense meant - of a low kind (after all, the origin of Chichikov is "dark and modest"). Ilya Ilyich Oblomov formulated this antithesis most expressively in his apology for laziness, where he opposes himself, a Russian master, to “another” - a low, uneducated person, whom “necessity tosses from corner to corner, he runs day and day” (“There are a lot of Germans sort of,” Zakhar said sullenly.
This situation changed only with the advent of raznochintsev heroes in literature, who could not afford to lie flat. It is characteristic that in the famous production of "Dead Souls" in the "Gogol Center" in 2013, Chichikov was played by the American Odin Byron, and the final poetic monologue about the trio bird was replaced by a perplexed question: "Rus, what do you want from me?" Explaining this choice, director Kirill Serebrennikov interprets the conflict of "Dead Souls" as a clash between "a man from the new world", industrial and rational, with the "Russian hardened local way of life." Long before Serebrennikov, Abram Tertz expressed a similar thought: “Gogol, as a magic wand, brought Russia - not Chatsky, not Lavretsky, not Ivan Susanin, and not even the elder Zosima, but Chichikov. This will not give out! Chichikov, only Chichikov is able to move and take out the cart of history, - Gogol foresaw at a time when there was no dream of any development of capitalism in Russia ... let me down!..” 22 Tertz A. (Sinyavsky A.D.) In the shadow of Gogol // Collected. op. in 2 volumes. T. 2. M .: Start, 1992. S. 23.
Performance "Dead Souls". Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. Gogol Center, 2014
Performance "Dead Souls". Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. Gogol Center, 2014
Did Gogol portray himself in Dead Souls?
In Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol describes his work as a way of spiritual improvement, a kind of psychotherapy: “I have already got rid of many of my nasty things by passing them on to my heroes, ridiculing them in them and making others also laugh at them.”
When reading "Dead Souls" it may seem that the author was too strict with himself. The features with which he endowed his characters look rather touching, in any case, it is they who give the heroes humanity - but it must be borne in mind that Gogol considered any habit, excessive attachment to the material world to be a weakness. And he had many such weaknesses. At the end of Chapter VII of "Dead Souls" for a moment one of the many seemingly completely random, but incredibly lively minor characters is shown - a Ryazan lieutenant, "a big, apparently, hunter for boots," who has already ordered four pairs and could not lie down. to sleep, constantly trying on the fifth: “the boots, for sure, were well-tailored, and for a long time he raised his leg and examined the smartly and marvelously stitched heel.” Lev Arnoldi (half-brother of Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, who knew Gogol briefly) assures in his memoirs that this passionate hunter of boots was Gogol himself: there were always three boots, often even four pairs, and they were never worn out.
Another example is given (also from Arnoldi’s memoirs) by Abram Tertz: “Gogol in his youth had a passion for acquiring unnecessary things - all kinds of inkwells, vases, paperweights: later it separated and developed into Chichikov’s hoarding, removed forever from the author’s home property” ( this observation is confirmed by many memoirists: partly in the form of self-improvement, partly for the practical reason that Gogol spent most of his life on the road and all his property fit in one chest, the writer at some point renounced mischief Addiction to collecting things, receiving gifts, bribes. From a Christian point of view, it is a sin. and all the graceful little things dear to his heart he passed on to friends).
Gogol was generally a big dandy with extravagant taste. In particular, Chichikov’s “woolen, rainbow-colored headscarf,” which the narrator, according to his statement, never wore, was just his own - Sergey Aksakov recalls how he saw the writer at work in Zhukovsky’s house in a striking outfit: “Instead of boots, long woolen Russian stockings above the knees; instead of a frock coat, over a flannel doublet, a velvet spencer; the neck is wrapped in a large multi-colored scarf, and on the head is a velvet, crimson, embroidered with gold kokoshnik, very similar to the headdress of muzzles.
"A! paid, paid!" cried the man. He also added a noun to the word patched, very successful, but not commonly used in secular conversation, and therefore we will skip it.<...>The Russian people express themselves strongly!
Nikolay Gogol
The habit of the governor of the city of N., who, as you know, was “a great kind man and even sometimes embroidered on tulle himself,” is also an autobiographical feature: as Pavel Annenkov recalled, Gogol had a passion for needlework and “with the approach of summer ... he began to cut out for himself neck shawls made of muslin and cambric, let the vests go a few lines lower, etc., and dealt with this matter very seriously ”; he loved to knit, cut dresses for his sisters.
Gogol allowed not only himself, but also those around him, however, even before, when working on Dead Souls, he set out to depict his own vices in the form of “monsters”. Finding a comic detail or situation in the surrounding life, he brought it to the grotesque, which made Gogol the inventor of Russian humor. Vladimir Nabokov mentions, say, Gogol's mother, "an absurd provincial lady who irritated her friends with the assertion that steam locomotives, steamboats and other innovations were invented by her son Nikolai (and she drove her son into a frenzy, delicately hinting that he was the writer of every just read a vulgar romance with her),” one cannot help but recall Khlestakov: “However, there are many of my works: “The Marriage of Figaro”, “Robert the Devil”, “Norma”.<…>All this that was under the name of Baron Brambeus ... I wrote all this ”(and, as you know, Gogol himself was“ with Pushkin on a friendly footing ”).
Expressions like “to call on Sopikov and Khrapovitsky, meaning all sorts of dead dreams on the side, on the back and in all other positions,” which cut the ears of critics in Dead Souls, Gogol, according to evidence, used in life.
The main thing, probably, was what he conveyed to Chichikov - a nomadic lifestyle and a love of fast driving. As the writer admitted in a letter to Zhukovsky: “The only time I felt good was when I was on the road. The road always saved me when I sat up for a long time on the spot or fell into the hands of doctors, because of their cowardice, who always harmed me, not knowing a single hair of my nature.
Arriving from Little Russia in St. Petersburg in December 1828 with the intention of serving, he went abroad six months later, and from then until the end of his life he traveled almost continuously. At the same time, in Rome, and in Paris, and in Vienna, and in Frankfurt, Gogol wrote exclusively about Russia, which, as he believed, was visible in its entirety only from afar (one exception is the story "Rome"). Diseases forced him to go to the waters in Baden-Baden, Karlsbad, Marienbad, Ostend for treatment; at the end of his life he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Russia, Gogol did not have his own home - he lived for a long time with friends (most of all - with Stepan Shevyrev and Mikhail Pogodin), but rather unceremoniously resettled his sisters by friends, taking them from the institute. The Gogol House Museum on Nikitsky Boulevard in Moscow is the former mansion of Count Alexander Tolstoy, where Gogol lived his last four years, burned the second volume of Dead Souls and died.
The story, satirically directed against the highest Petersburg administration, became the main and only obstacle to the publication of Dead Souls. Probably, foreseeing this, even before the manuscript was handed over to censorship, Gogol himself significantly edited the first edition of the story, throwing out the finale, which tells about the adventures of Kopeikin, who robbed with a whole army of "runaway soldiers" in the Ryazan forests (but "all this, in fact, so to speak, aimed at only the state ”; Kopeikin robbed only the state, without touching private people, thereby resembling a national avenger), and then fled to America, from where he writes a letter to the sovereign and seeks royal mercy for his comrades so that his story does not repeated. The second edition of the story, which is now considered normative, ends only with a hint that Captain Kopeikin became the chieftain of a gang of robbers.
But even in the softened version, the censor Alexander Nikitenko called "Kopeikin" "completely impossible to skip," which plunged the writer into despair. “This is one of the best places in the poem, and without it there is a hole that I can’t pay and sew up with anything,” Gogol wrote to Pletnev on April 10, 1842. I would rather change it than lose it altogether. I threw out all the generals, the character of Kopeikin meant more, so now it is clear that he himself is the cause of everything and that he was treated well. Instead of a hero who suffered for his homeland and brought to complete despair by the neglect of the authorities, Kopeikin now turned out to be a red tape and a rogue with immoderate claims: “I can’t, he says, get along somehow. I need, he says, to eat a cutlet, a bottle of French wine, to entertain myself too, in the theater, you understand.
Neither in the corridors, nor in the rooms, their eyes were struck by cleanliness. They didn't care about her back then; and what was dirty remained dirty, not taking on an attractive appearance
Nikolay Gogol
The story does not seem to relate to the development of the plot in any way and looks like an inserted short story in it. However, the author cherished this episode so much that he was not ready to print the poem without it and preferred to mutilate the story, throwing out all politically sensitive places from it - obviously, satire was not the main thing in Kopeikin.
According to Yuri Mann, one of the artistic functions of the story is "the interruption of the" provincial "plan by the Petersburg, capital ones, the inclusion in the plot of the poem of the higher metropolitan spheres of Russian life" 23 Mann Yu. V. Gogol's Poetics, 2nd ed., add. M.: Fiction, 1988. S. 285. . The researcher interprets Kopeikin as a "little man" rebelling against the repressive and soulless state machine - this interpretation was legitimized in Soviet literary criticism, but it was brilliantly refuted by Yuri Lotman, who showed that the meaning of the story is generally different.
Noting the choice of Gogol, who made his Kopeikin not a soldier, but a captain and an officer, Lotman explains: “An army captain is a rank of the 9th class, which gave the right to hereditary nobility and, consequently, to soul ownership. The choice of such a hero to play the role of a positive character of the natural school is strange for a writer with such a heightened "sense of rank" as Gogol was. In Kopeikin, the philologist sees a reduced version of the literary "noble robbers"; According to Lotman, it was this story that Pushkin gave to Gogol, who was fascinated by the image of a robber nobleman, dedicated his “Dubrovsky” to him and intended to use it in the unwritten novel “Russian Pelam”.
The main character himself is also endowed with parody features of a romantic robber in Dead Souls: he breaks into Korobochka at night, “like Rinald Rinaldina”, he is suspected of kidnapping a girl, like Kopeikin, he deceives not individuals, but only the treasury - a direct Robin Hood . But Chichikov, as we know, has many faces, he is a round void, an average figure; therefore, he is surrounded by “literary projections, each of which is “both parodic and serious” and highlights one or another important ideology for the author, to which Dead Souls refers or argues: Sobakevich came out as if from an epic, Manilov - from sentimentalism , Plyushkin is the reincarnation of a miserly knight. Kopeikin is a tribute to the romantic, Byronic tradition, which is of paramount importance in the poem; this "literary projection" was indeed indispensable. In the romantic tradition, it was on the side of the hero - the villain and outcast - that the sympathies of the author and the reader were; his demonism is from disappointment with society, he is charming against the backdrop of vulgarities, he is always left with the possibility of redemption and salvation (usually under the influence of female love). Gogol, on the other hand, approaches the question of moral rebirth from a different, not romantic, but Christian side. Gogol's parodic comparisons - Kopeikin, Napoleon or the Antichrist - remove the halo of nobility from evil, make it ridiculous, vulgar and insignificant, that is, absolutely hopeless, "and it is precisely in its hopelessness that the possibility of an equally complete and absolute rebirth lurks."
The poem was conceived as a trilogy, the first part of which was supposed to make the reader horrified by showing all the Russian abominations, the second - to give hope, and the third - to show a picture of rebirth. Already on November 28, 1836, in the same letter Mikhail Pogodin Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin (1800-1875) - historian, prose writer, publisher of the Moskvityanin magazine. Pogodin was born into a peasant family, and by the middle of the 19th century he had become such an influential figure that he gave advice to Emperor Nicholas I. Pogodin was considered the center of literary Moscow, he published the almanac Urania, in which he published poems by Pushkin, Baratynsky, Vyazemsky, Tyutchev, in his "Moskvityanin" was published by Gogol, Zhukovsky, Ostrovsky. The publisher shared the views of the Slavophiles, developed the ideas of pan-Slavism, and was close to the philosophical circle of philosophers. Pogodin professionally studied the history of Ancient 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 "all Rus' will respond", - he explains that the poem will be "in several volumes." One can imagine what a high standard Gogol set for himself, if the first and only published volume of the poem began to seem insignificant to him over time, like “a porch hastily attached by the provincial architect to the palace, which was planned to be built on a colossal scale.” Having promised himself and his readers to describe nothing less than the whole of Rus' and give a recipe for saving the soul, announcing a “husband gifted with valor” and a “wonderful Russian girl”, Gogol drove himself into a trap. The second volume was eagerly awaited, moreover, Gogol himself mentioned it so often that a rumor spread among his friends that the book was ready. Pogodin even announced its release in Moskvityanin in 1841, for which he received from Gogol reprimand From French - reproach, reprimand. .
In the meantime, the work didn't go on. Throughout 1843-1845, the writer continuously complains in letters to Aksakov, Zhukovsky, Yazykov about a creative crisis, which is then further exacerbated by a mysterious illness - Gogol is afraid of "spleen, which can intensify an even more painful state" and sadly admits: "I tortured myself, raped to write, suffered severe suffering, seeing his impotence, and several times already caused himself illness by such coercion and could not do anything, and everything came out by force and bad" 24 Selected passages from correspondence with friends // Complete works of NV Gogol. 2nd ed. T. 3. M., 1867. . Gogol is ashamed to return to his homeland, as "a man sent on business and returning empty-handed," and in 1845 for the first time burned the second volume of "Dead Souls", the fruit of five years of labor. In "Selected Places ..." in 1846, he explains: "It is necessary to take into account not the pleasure of some lovers of arts and literature, but all readers," and the latter, according to the reader, would be harmed rather than benefited. , a few striking examples of virtue (in contrast to the cartoons from the first volume), if you do not immediately show them, "as clear as day", the universal path of moral perfection. By this time, Gogol considers art only a stepping stone to preaching.
Neck, shoulders were open just as much as necessary, and no further; each bared her possessions until she felt, by her own conviction, that they were capable of destroying a person; everything else was tucked away with extraordinary taste
Nikolay Gogol
Such a sermon was "Selected Places", which greatly damaged Gogol's reputation in the liberal camp as an apology for serfdom and an example of church hypocrisy. By the time Selected Places was published, friends-correspondents were already (despite the real cult of Gogol) annoyed by his real letters, in which Gogol lectured them and literally dictated the daily routine. Sergei Aksakov wrote to him: “I am fifty-three years old. I then read Thomas a Kempis Thomas a Kempis (c. 1379 - 1471) - writer, Catholic monk. The probable author of the anonymous theological treatise "On the Imitation of Christ", which became the program text of the New Piety spiritual movement. The treatise criticizes the outward piety of Christians and praises self-denial as a way of becoming like Christ. before you were born.<…>I do not condemn any, anyone's convictions, if only they were sincere; but, of course, I won’t accept anyone’s… And suddenly you imprison me, like a boy, for reading Thomas of Kempis, by force, without knowing my convictions, but how else? at the agreed time, after coffee, and dividing the reading of the chapter, as if into lessons ... Both funny and annoying ... "
All of this mental evolution took place in parallel with and in connection with a mental illness very similar in description to what until recently was called manic-depressive psychosis, and today is more accurately called bipolar disorder. Throughout his life, Gogol suffered from mood swings - periods of seething creative energy, when the writer created both bright and unusually funny things and, according to his friends, started dancing in the street, were replaced by black stripes. Gogol experienced the first such attack in Rome in 1840: “The sun, the sky - everything is unpleasant for me. My poor soul: she has no shelter here. I am now more fit for a monastery than for secular life. The very next year, the spleen is replaced by ecstatic energy (“I am deeply happy, I know and hear wondrous moments, a wonderful creation is happening and taking place in my soul”) and immoderate self-conceit, characteristic of a state of hypomania (“Oh, believe my words. from now on, my word"). A year later, in Gogol's description, 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 immobile in a room, sometimes for 2-3 weeks. . My head is stiff. The last bonds that bind me to the light have been severed."
In 1848, Gogol, who was becoming more and more religious, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but this did not bring him relief; after that, he became the spiritual child of Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, who called for fierce asceticism and inspired the writer with thoughts about the sinfulness of all his creative work. labor 25 Svyatopolk-Mirsky D.P. The history of Russian literature from ancient times to 1925. Novosibirsk: Svinin and sons, 2006, p. 239. . Apparently, under his influence, aggravated by a creative crisis and depression, on February 24, 1852, Gogol burned the almost finished second volume of Dead Souls in the stove. Ten days later, falling into black melancholy, Gogol died, apparently having starved himself to death under the guise of fasting.
The text of the second volume of the poem, available to us now, is not Gogol's work, but a reconstruction based on the autographs of five chapters found after Gogol's death by Stepan Shevyryov (and existing in two editions), separate passages and sketches. In print, the second volume of "Dead Souls" first appeared in 1855 as an addition to the second collected works ("The works of Nikolai Vasilievich 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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Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in the town of Sorochintsy, Mirgorodsky district, Poltava province. His Childhood passed in the family estate of Vasilievka. Father, a passionate admirer of the theater, wrote poems, plays, then presented them on the amateur stage with wealthy relatives of the Troshchinskys.
Gogol himself, while studying at the gymnasium (the city of Nizhyn), was also fond of theater and participated in productions. Young Gogol even played the role of Mrs. Prostakova in Fonvizin's The Undergrowth; as witnesses said, the audience laughed until colic.
In the "Author's Confession" he described his first experiences in literary work. “My first experiments, the first exercises in compositions, for which I had acquired the habit during my recent stay at school, were almost all of a lyrical and serious kind. Neither I myself, nor my companions, who also practiced with me in compositions, did not think that I would have to be a comic and satirical writer ... "
Already in those years, Gogol knew how to accept criticism: when The Brothers Tverdoslavich, a Slavic Tale was considered unsuccessful by his friends, he “did not resist or object. He quite calmly tore his manuscript into small pieces and threw it into a stoking stove, ”his classmate wrote. This was the first known burning of Gogol's works.
Classmates did not notice his talent, and a funny recollection of one of them has been preserved: “N. V. Gogol passionately loved drawing, literature, but it would be too ridiculous to think that Gogol would be Gogol.
Poor health and lack of funds did not prevent Nikolai Vasilyevich from deciding to go to St. Petersburg in search of his fate (1828).
Here is how the modern Swedish writer Chel Johansson presents his thoughts and feelings in his story “The Face of Gogol”: “I am only nineteen! I was only nineteen years old when I first breathed the winter Petersburg air. And as a result, he caught a severe cold.
With a high temperature and a frostbitten nose, I lay in bed in the apartment that we rented from Danilevsky and I rented ...
In the end I got up, staggered, crawled out into the street and went to wander. Where am I?
I'm standing at Pushkin's house! It must be warm and cozy inside. Pushkin is sitting there .. I'm calling. The footman who opened the door looks me up and down.
Pushkin, - I squeeze out at last, - I need to see Pushkin. This meeting did not take place. But she was there. Very little time passed, and he met Zhukovsky (in 1830), with Pushkin (in 1831) ... They meet, and this is what Pushkin wrote about his young friend: “Our readers, of course, remember the impression made on us by the appearance“ Evenings on a Farm”: everyone rejoiced at this lively description of a singing and dancing tribe, these fresh pictures of Little Russian nature, this cheerfulness, simple-hearted and crafty at the same time. Fonvizin!
And here is how Pushkin's conversation with Gogol appears to a modern writer: “Nikolai, I gave you the plot of The Government Inspector, here's another one for you. One rogue travels around Russia and, in order to get rich, buys up dead souls, serfs who have died, but have not yet been included in the revision tale. Do you understand? Good idea, huh? Here you can depict the whole of Russia, whatever you want!
You gave me so much, Alexander Sergeevich!.. Today you gave me "Dead Souls"... You say that you yourself
it is impossible to tell this story as long as there is censorship. Why do you think I can do it?"
Gogol proceeds to his main work. He writes it in Italy, but is constantly connected with his homeland. News comes from there. Here is an article by V. G. Belinsky in the Teleskop magazine, which says that Gogol said a new word about literature. Like everything in his stories, “simple, ordinary, natural and true, and, together, how original and new!” Gogol is glad But a few hours after reading the article, terrible news comes: Pushkin is dead ...
So, Pushkin was gone. “My loss,” wrote Gogol, “is greater than all. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t write anything without his advice… The Great One was gone.”
Meanwhile, work on "Dead Souls" was going on. Of course, it was not a continuous holiday. As in life, difficulties, failures, and disappointments are inevitable in artistic creation. “In order to succeed, you have to experience failure. ... But if you are strong enough, you can easily withstand all failures, moreover, you rejoice in them, in this continuous fiasco in front of yourself. The road will be mastered by the walking one!
I was going to create something that no one had ever created before. "Dead Souls" will become the great work that Pushkin bequeathed to me to write.
Like Dante's Divine Comedy, it will consist of three parts: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Already the first part will highlight the whole of Russia, will expose all the evil. I knew that the book would cause outrage and protests. Such is my fate, to be at war with my compatriots. But when the second part comes out, the protests will fall silent, and with the completion of the third part, I will be recognized as a spiritual leader. For here the secret plan of this work will be revealed. Works about people without a soul and about the death of human souls. Works about the art of poetry. And the idea is this: the path of people to salvation. To life! Resurrection! Resurrection!
After three years of living abroad (Germany, Switzerland, France (Paris), Italy (Naples, Rome), he came to Moscow and read to his friends the first six chapters of the first volume of Dead Souls. Gogol called his mother to Moscow, settled his financial affairs. .. In September 1839, he was again in Rome and wrote from there to S. T. Aksakov: "My work is great, my feat is saving. I have now died for everything petty ..." And there are already signs of an illness in his state that overshadowed the end his life.
In May 1842 Dead Souls went out of print. The success of the book was extraordinary. Gogol again goes abroad, tries to be treated, spends the winter in warm regions. Six nomadic years pass abroad.
In 1845 he burned the written chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls, in 1846 he prepared the book Selected passages from correspondence with friends.
In the "Author's Confession" Gogol states: "... it is not my business to teach with a sermon ...", but this is exactly what we see on the pages of Selected Places, which have not been published in our country for many years, and now, when they are published without reductions or exceptions, once again gave rise to the most irreconcilable disputes.
After a trip to the holy places in Palestine, Gogol returned to Russia in 1848. Twice he visited the house in Vasilievka, one winter he fled from the cold in Odessa. He wrote a lot, suffered from lack of money, was sick, was treated ...
The second volume of Dead Souls was born slowly. On the night of February 12, 1852, the author burned all the newly written chapters of his great poem.
After the destruction of his creations, Gogol was greatly weakened.
He did not leave his room anymore, he did not want to see anyone. Almost stopped eating, only occasionally drank a sip or two of water. He sat motionless in armchairs for days on end, staring blankly at one point.
Dead Souls is a poem for the ages. The plasticity of the depicted reality, the comical nature of situations and the artistic skill of N.V. Gogol paint the image of Russia not only of the past, but also of the future. Grotesque satirical reality in harmony with patriotic notes create an unforgettable melody of life that resounds through the centuries.
Collegiate adviser Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov goes to distant provinces to buy serfs. However, he is not interested in people, but only the names of the dead. This is necessary to submit the list to the Board of Trustees, which "promises" a lot of money. A nobleman with so many peasants had all the doors open. To implement his plan, he pays visits to the landowners and officials of the city of NN. All of them reveal their selfish disposition, so the hero manages to get what he wants. He also plans a profitable marriage. However, the result is deplorable: the hero is forced to flee, as his plans become well known thanks to the landowner Korobochka.
History of creation
N.V. Gogol considered A.S. Pushkin by his teacher, who “given” a story about the adventures of Chichikov to a grateful student. The poet was sure that only Nikolai Vasilievich, who had a unique talent from God, was able to realize this “idea”.
The writer loved Italy, Rome. In the land of the great Dante, he began work on a book involving a three-part composition in 1835. The poem was supposed to be similar to Dante's Divine Comedy, depicting the hero's immersion in hell, his wanderings in purgatory and the resurrection of his soul in paradise.
The creative process continued for six years. The idea of a grandiose picture, depicting not only "all of Rus'" present, but also the future, revealed "the incalculable riches of the Russian spirit." In February 1837, Pushkin dies, whose “sacred testament” for Gogol is “Dead Souls”: “Not a single line was written without me imagining him before me.” The first volume was completed in the summer of 1841, but did not immediately find its reader. The censors were outraged by The Tale of Captain Kopeikin, and the title was perplexing. I had to make concessions, starting the headline with the intriguing phrase "The Adventures of Chichikov." Therefore, the book was published only in 1842.
Some time later, Gogol writes the second volume, but, dissatisfied with the result, burns it.
The meaning of the name
The title of the work causes conflicting interpretations. The used oxymoron technique gives rise to numerous questions that you want to get answers as soon as possible. The title is symbolic and ambiguous, so the “secret” is not revealed to everyone.
In the literal sense, "dead souls" are representatives of the common people who have gone to another world, but are still listed as their masters. Gradually, the concept is being rethought. The “form” seems to “come to life”: real serfs, with their habits and shortcomings, appear before the reader's eyes.
Characteristics of the main characters
- Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov - "gentleman of the middle hand." Somewhat cloying manners in dealing with people are not without sophistication. Educated, neat and delicate. “Not handsome, but not bad-looking, not ... fat, nor .... thin…”. Prudent and careful. He collects unnecessary knickknacks in his chest: maybe it will come in handy! Seeking profit in everything. The creation of the worst sides of an enterprising and energetic person of a new type, opposed to landowners and officials. We wrote about it in more detail in the essay "".
- Manilov - "knight of the void." Blond "sweet" talker "with blue eyes". The poverty of thought, the avoidance of real difficulties, he covers up with a beautiful-hearted phrase. It lacks living aspirations and any interests. His faithful companions are fruitless fantasy and thoughtless chatter.
- The box is "club-headed". Vulgar, stupid, stingy and stingy nature. She fenced herself off from everything around, shutting herself in her estate - the “box”. Turned into a stupid and greedy woman. Limited, stubborn and unspiritual.
- Nozdrev is a "historical man". He can easily lie what he pleases and deceive anyone. Empty, absurd. Thinks of himself as a broad kind. However, the actions expose the careless, chaotically weak-willed and at the same time arrogant, shameless "tyrant". Record holder for getting into tricky and ridiculous situations.
- Sobakevich is a "patriot of the Russian stomach." Outwardly, it resembles a bear: clumsy and indefatigable. Totally incapable of understanding the most elementary things. A special type of "drive" that can quickly adapt to the new requirements of our time. Interested in nothing but housekeeping. we described in the essay of the same name.
- Plyushkin - "a hole in humanity." A creature of unknown gender. A vivid example of a moral fall that has completely lost its natural appearance. The only character (except Chichikov) who has a biography that "reflects" the gradual process of personality degradation. Complete nothingness. Plyushkin's maniacal hoarding "results" into "cosmic" proportions. And the more this passion seizes him, the less of a person remains in him. We analyzed his image in detail in the essay. .
- Thorns on the way of the development of the Motherland is the main problem in the poem "Dead Souls", which the author was worried about. These include bribery and embezzlement of officials, infantilism and inactivity of the nobility, ignorance and poverty of the peasants. The writer sought to make his contribution to the prosperity of Russia, condemning and ridiculing vices, educating new generations of people. For example, Gogol despised doxology as a cover for the emptiness and idleness of existence. The life of a citizen should be useful for society, and most of the heroes of the poem are frankly harmful.
- Moral problems. He considers the absence of moral norms among the representatives of the ruling class as the result of their ugly passion for hoarding. The landowners are ready to shake the soul out of the peasant for the sake of profit. Also, the problem of selfishness comes to the fore: the nobles, like officials, think only about their own interests, the homeland for them is an empty weightless word. High society does not care about the common people, they just use them for their own purposes.
- Crisis of humanism. People are sold like animals, lost at cards like things, pawned like jewelry. Slavery is legal and is not considered something immoral or unnatural. Gogol covered the problem of serfdom in Russia globally, showing both sides of the coin: the mentality of a serf, inherent in a serf, and the tyranny of the owner, confident in his superiority. All these are the consequences of the tyranny that pervades relationships in all walks of life. It corrupts people and destroys the country.
- The author's humanism is manifested in attention to the "little man", a critical exposure of the vices of the state system. Gogol did not even try to avoid political problems. He described a bureaucracy functioning only on the basis of bribery, nepotism, embezzlement and hypocrisy.
- Gogol's characters are characterized by the problem of ignorance, moral blindness. Because of it, they do not see their moral squalor and are not able to independently get out of the quagmire of vulgarity that is engulfing them.
Genre and composition
Initially, the work was born as an adventurous - picaresque novel. But the breadth of the events described and the historical truthfulness, as if "compressed" among themselves, gave rise to "talk about" the realistic method. Making accurate remarks, inserting philosophical reasoning, referring to different generations, Gogol saturated "his offspring" with lyrical digressions. One cannot but agree with the opinion that the creation of Nikolai Vasilyevich is a comedy, since it actively uses the techniques of irony, humor and satire, which most fully reflect the absurdity and arbitrariness of the "squadron of flies that dominate Rus'."
The composition is circular: the britzka, which entered the city of NN at the beginning of the story, leaves it after all the vicissitudes that happened to the hero. Episodes are woven into this “ring”, without which the integrity of the poem is violated. The first chapter describes the provincial city NN and local officials. From the second to the sixth chapters, the author introduces readers to the estates of Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdrev, Sobakevich and Plyushkin. The seventh - tenth chapters - a satirical image of officials, the execution of completed transactions. The string of these events ends with a ball, where Nozdrev "narrates" about Chichikov's scam. The reaction of society to his statement is unambiguous - gossip, which, like a snowball, is overgrown with fables that have found refraction, including in the short story ("The Tale of Captain Kopeikin") and the parable (about Kif Mokievich and Mokiya Kifovich). The introduction of these episodes makes it possible to emphasize that the fate of the motherland directly depends on the people living in it. It is impossible to look indifferently at the outrages that are happening around. Certain forms of protest are brewing in the country. The eleventh chapter is a biography of the hero forming the plot, explaining what he was guided by when performing this or that act.
The connecting thread of the composition is the image of the road (you can learn more about this by reading the essay “ » ), symbolizing the path that the state “under the modest name of Rus” passes in its development.
Why does Chichikov need dead souls?
Chichikov is not only cunning, but also pragmatic. His sophisticated mind is ready to “make candy” out of nothing. Not having sufficient capital, he, being a good psychologist, having gone through a good life school, mastering the art of “flattering everyone” and fulfilling his father’s precept “save a penny”, starts a great speculation. It consists in a simple deception of "those in power" in order to "warm up their hands", in other words, to help out a huge amount of money, thereby providing for themselves and their future family, which Pavel Ivanovich dreamed of.
The names of the dead peasants bought for a pittance were recorded in a document that Chichikov could take to the Treasury Chamber under the guise of a pledge in order to obtain a loan. He would pawn the serfs like a brooch in a pawnshop, and could re-pawn them all his life, since none of the officials checked the physical condition of people. For this money, the businessman would have bought both real workers and an estate, and would have lived on a grand scale, taking advantage of the favor of the nobles, because the wealth of the landowner was measured by the representatives of the nobility in the number of souls (peasants were then called “souls” in noble slang). In addition, Gogol's hero hoped to win trust in society and profitably marry a rich heiress.
main idea
A hymn to the motherland and people, the hallmark of which is diligence, sounds on the pages of the poem. Masters of golden hands became famous for their inventions, their creativity. The Russian peasant is always "rich in invention." But there are those citizens who hinder the development of the country. These are vicious officials, ignorant and inactive landowners and swindlers like Chichikov. For their own good, the good of Russia and the world, they must take the path of correction, realizing the ugliness of their inner world. To do this, Gogol mercilessly ridicules them throughout the entire first volume, however, in the subsequent parts of the work, the author intended to show the resurrection of the spirit of these people using the protagonist as an example. Perhaps he felt the falsity of subsequent chapters, lost faith that his dream was feasible, so he burned it along with the second part of Dead Souls.
Nevertheless, the author showed that the main wealth of the country is the broad soul of the people. It is no coincidence that this word is placed in the title. The writer believed that the revival of Russia would begin with the revival of human souls, pure, unstained by any sins, selfless. Not just believing in the free future of the country, but making a lot of efforts on this swift road to happiness. "Rus, where are you going?" This question runs like a refrain throughout the book and emphasizes the main thing: the country must live in constant movement towards the best, advanced, progressive. Only on this path "other peoples and states give it way." We wrote a separate essay about the path of Russia: ?
Why did Gogol burn the second volume of Dead Souls?
At some point, the thought of the messiah begins to dominate in the mind of the writer, allowing him to "foresee" the revival of Chichikov and even Plyushkin. The progressive "transformation" of a person into a "dead man" Gogol hopes to reverse. But, faced with reality, the author is deeply disappointed: the heroes and their destinies come out from under the pen far-fetched, lifeless. Did not work out. The impending crisis in worldview became the reason for the destruction of the second book.
In the surviving passages from the second volume, it is clearly seen that the writer depicts Chichikov not in the process of repentance, but in flight to the abyss. He still succeeds in adventures, dresses in a devilish red coat and breaks the law. His exposure does not bode well, because in his reaction the reader will not see a sudden insight or a paint of shame. He does not even believe in the possibility of the existence of such fragments at least ever. Gogol did not want to sacrifice artistic truth even for the sake of realizing his own idea.
Issues
What is the originality of the work?
Adventurism, realistic reality, a sense of the presence of the irrational, philosophical discussions about earthly good - all this is closely intertwined, creating an "encyclopedic" picture of the first half of the 19th century.
Gogol achieves this by using various techniques of satire, humor, visual means, numerous details, rich vocabulary, and compositional features.
- Symbolism plays an important role. Falling into the mud "predicts" the future exposure of the main character. The spider weaves its webs to capture the next victim. Like an "unpleasant" insect, Chichikov skillfully conducts his "business", "weaving" the landowners and officials with a noble lie. “sounds” like the pathos of the forward movement of Rus' and affirms human self-improvement.
- We observe the heroes through the prism of "comic" situations, apt author's expressions and characteristics given by other characters, sometimes built on the antithesis: "he was a prominent person" - but only "at a glance".
- The vices of the heroes of "Dead Souls" become a continuation of the positive character traits. For example, Plyushkin's monstrous stinginess is a distortion of former frugality and thriftiness.
- In small lyrical "inserts" - the thoughts of the writer, hard thoughts, anxious "I". In them we feel the highest creative message: to help humanity change for the better.
- The fate of people who create works for the people or not for the sake of "those in power" does not leave Gogol indifferent, because in literature he saw a force capable of "re-educating" society and contributing to its civilized development. The social strata of society, their position in relation to everything national: culture, language, traditions - occupy a serious place in the author's digressions. When it comes to Rus' and its future, through the centuries we hear the confident voice of the “prophet”, predicting the future of the Fatherland, which is not easy, but striving towards a bright dream.
- Philosophical reflections on the frailty of being, on the bygone youth and impending old age, evoke sadness. That is why the gentle “fatherly” appeal to the youth is so natural, on whose energy, diligence and education depends on what “path” the development of Russia will take.
- The language is truly folk. The forms of colloquial, bookish and written-business speech are harmoniously woven into the fabric of the poem. Rhetorical questions and exclamations, the rhythmic construction of individual phrases, the use of Slavicisms, archaisms, sonorous epithets create a certain structure of speech that sounds solemn, excited and sincere, without a shadow of irony. When describing landowners' estates and their owners, vocabulary is used that is characteristic of everyday speech. The image of the bureaucratic world is saturated with the vocabulary of the depicted environment. we described in the essay of the same name.
- The solemnity of comparisons, high style, combined with original speech, create a sublimely ironic manner of narration that serves to debunk the base, vulgar world of the owners.
Chichikov and his servants
- Chichikov Pavel Ivanovich - a former official (retired collegiate adviser), and now a schemer: he is engaged in buying up the so-called "dead souls" (written information about the peasants who have died since the last revision) to mortgage them as alive, to take a loan from a bank and acquire weight in society. He dresses smartly, looks after himself and, after a long and dusty Russian road, manages to look as if he had just come from a tailor and a barber.
- Selifan - Chichikov's coachman, short in stature, loves round dances with thoroughbred and slender girls. Connoisseur of the characters of horses. He is addicted to alcoholic beverages. He dresses like a man.
- Petrushka - Chichikov's servant, 30 years old (in the first volume), big-nosed and big-mouthed, lover of taverns and bread wines. She loves to brag about her travels. From dislike for the bath, wherever it is, there is a unique amber of Parsley. He dresses in worn clothes that are somewhat too big for him from the master's shoulder.
- Chubary, Gnedoy and brown Assessor - the trio of Chichikov's horses, respectively; right tie-down, root and left tie-down. Gnedoy and Assessor are honest hard workers, while Chubary, according to Selifan, is a sly one and only pretends to pull the shafts.
Inhabitants of the city N and its environs
- Governor;
- Governor;
- Governor's daughter;
- Lieutenant Governor;
- Chairman of the Chamber;
- Chief of Police;
- Postmaster;
- Prosecutor;
- Manilov, a landowner (the surname "Manilov" became a household name to denote an inactive dreamer, and a dreamy and inactive attitude to everything around him began to be called "Manilovism");
- Lizonka Manilova, Manilov's wife;
- Themistoclus Manilov - Manilov's eldest son (8 years old);
- Alkid Manilov - the youngest son of Manilov (6 years old);
- Korobochka Nastasya Petrovna, landowner;
- Nozdryov, landowner;
- Mizhuev, Nozdryov's "son-in-law";
- Sobakevich Mikhail Semyonovich, landowner;
- Sobakevich Feoduliya Ivanovna, wife of Sobakevich;
- Plyushkin Stepan, landowner;
- Uncle Mityai;
- Uncle Minyay;
- "A pleasant lady in all respects";
- "Just a nice lady."
Volume 2
Unlike Goncharov's hero, Tentetnikov did not completely plunge into Oblomovism. He will join an anti-government organization and will be put on trial in a political case. The author had a role planned for him in the unwritten third volume.“... Tentetnikov belonged to the family of those people who are not translated in Rus', who used to have names: goofs, couch potatoes, bastards, and whom now, really, I don’t know what to call. Are such characters already born, or are they formed later, as a product of sad circumstances that severely surround a person? ... Where is the one who, in the native language of our Russian soul, would be able to tell us this almighty word: forward! who, knowing all the forces, and properties, and the whole depth of our nature, with one magical wave could direct us to a high life? With what tears, what love, a grateful Russian would pay him. But eyelids pass after century, half a million Sydneys, goofs and bobakov doze soundly, and a husband is rarely born in Rus' who knows how to pronounce this almighty word.
“... Alexander Petrovich was gifted with a flair to hear human nature ... He usually said:“ I demand the mind, and not anything else. Whoever thinks of being smart has no time to play pranks: prank must disappear by itself. He did not restrain many playfulness, seeing in them the beginning of the development of spiritual properties and saying that he needed them, like rashes to a doctor - then, in order to find out for sure what exactly is contained inside a person. He did not have many teachers: he read most of the sciences himself. Without pedantic terms, pompous views and views, he was able to convey the very soul of science, so that even a minor could see what he needed it for ... But it is necessary that at the very time when he (Tentetnikov) was transferred to this course of the elect, ... an extraordinary mentor suddenly died ... Everything has changed in the school. In place of Alexander Petrovich, some Fedor Ivanovich entered ... "
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (later edition), Chapter One
“... In the free swagger of the first-year children, something unbridled seemed to him. He began to establish some kind of external order between them, demanded that the young people remain in some kind of silent silence, so that in no case would everyone go around like in pairs. He even began to measure the distance from a couple to a couple with a yardstick. At the table, for a better view, he seated everyone in height ... "
“... And just as if to spite his predecessor, he announced from the first day that intelligence and success meant nothing to him, that he would look only at good behavior ... It’s strange: Fyodor Ivanovich did not achieve good behavior. Hidden pranks started. Everything was in order during the day and went in pairs, but at night there were revelry ... Respect for superiors and authorities was lost: they began to mock both mentors and teachers ”
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (later edition), Chapter One
“... to blasphemy and ridicule of religion itself, only because the director demanded frequent going to church and a bad priest got caught [not a very smart priest (in a later edition)]”
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (Early Edition), Chapter One
“... The directors began to be called Fedka, Bulka and other different names. The depravity started up not at all childish ... night orgies of comrades who acquired some kind of lady [mistress - one for eight people (in an early version)] in front of the very windows of the director's apartment ...
Something strange happened to the sciences too. New teachers were discharged, with new views and points of view ... "
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (later edition), Chapter One
“... They read learnedly, bombarded the listeners with many new terms and words. There was a logical connection, and following new discoveries, but alas! there was only no life in science itself. All this began to seem dead in the eyes of the listeners who had already begun to understand ... He (Tentetnikov) listened to the professors getting excited in the department, and recalled the former mentor, who, without getting excited, knew how to speak clearly. He listened to chemistry, and the philosophy of rights, and professorial deepenings into all the subtleties of political science, and the general history of mankind in such a huge form that the professor only had time to read the introduction and development of the communities of some German cities in three years; but all this remained in his head in some ugly shreds. Thanks to his natural mind, he only felt that this was not how it should be taught ... Ambition was strongly aroused in him, but he had no activity and field. It would be better not to excite him! .. "
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (Early Edition), Chapter One
“... If a transparent picture suddenly flared up in a dark room, lit from behind by a lamp, it would not have struck as much as this figurine shining with life, which appeared exactly to illuminate the room. It seemed as if a sunbeam flew into the room with her, suddenly illuminating the ceiling, the cornice and its dark corners ... It was hard to say what land she was born in. Such a pure, noble outline of the face could not be found anywhere, except perhaps only on some ancient cameos. Straight and light, like an arrow, she seemed to tower over everyone with her height. But it was a deception. She was not tall at all. This happened from the extraordinary harmony and the harmonious relationship between all parts of the body, from the head to the fingers ... "
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two, Chapter Two
"Fool, fool!" Chichikov thought. "He'll squander everything and turn the children into little buggers. A decent estate. You'll see - the peasants are fine, and they're not bad. And when they get enlightened there at the restaurants and in the theaters, everything will go to hell. I would live myself, a kulebyaka, in the countryside ... Well, how can such a person go to St. Petersburg or Moscow? With such hospitality, he will live in fluff there in three years! That is, he did not know that now it has been improved: and without hospitality, to lower everything not in three years, but in three months.
“But I know what you think,” said the Rooster.
- "What?" Chichikov asked, embarrassed.
- “You think:“ Fool, this fool, this Rooster, called for dinner, but there is still no dinner. He will be ready, most respected, the short-haired girl will not have time to braid her braids, as he will be in time ... ""
- Aleksasha and Nikolasha - the sons of Pyotr Petrovich Petukh, high school students.
"... who slammed glass after glass; it was clear ahead what part of human knowledge they would pay attention to upon arrival in the capital "
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (later edition), Chapter Three
- Platonov Platon Mikhailovich - a wealthy gentleman, a very handsome young man of high stature, but overcome by blues in life, who did not find himself interested. According to brother Vasily, he is illegible for acquaintances. He agrees to accompany Chichikov on his wanderings, in order to finally dispel this boredom by traveling. Chichikov was very glad to have such a companion: he could be dumped on all travel expenses and, on occasion, borrow a large sum of money.
- Voronoi-Cheapy - a landowner, a leader of a certain underground.
- Skudrozhoglo (Kostanzhoglo, Poponzhoglo, Gobrozhoglo, Berdanzhoglo) Konstantin Fedorovich - a landowner for about forty years. Southern appearance, swarthy and energetic person with very lively eyes, although somewhat bilious and feverish; strongly criticizes the foreign orders and fashions that have become fashionable in Rus'. An ideal business executive, a landowner not from birth, but from nature. He bought a ruined farm inexpensively and increased his income several times in a few years. He buys up the land of the surrounding landlords and, as the economy develops, becomes a manufacturing capitalist. He lives ascetically and simply, has no interests that do not bring an honest income.
There is an assumption that the famous industrialist Dmitry Benardaki was the prototype of this hero.“... about Konstantin Fedorovich - what can we say! this is a kind of Napoleon…”
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (later edition), Chapter Four
- Skudrozhoglo's wife is the sister of the Platonovs, outwardly similar to Plato. To match her husband, a very economic woman.
- Colonel Koshkarev - landowner. He looks very stern, dry face extremely serious. He failed the economy and went bankrupt, but on the other hand he created an “ideal” system of managing the estate in the form of all kinds of government offices in disorder lined up in the village, commissions, subcommissions and paperwork between them; officials - former peasants: a parody of a developed bureaucratic system in an undeveloped country. To Chichikov's question about buying dead souls, in order to show how smoothly his administrative apparatus works, he entrusts this matter in writing to his departments. A long written answer that came in the evening, firstly, reprimands Chichikov for not having the appropriate education, since he calls the revision souls dead: the dead are not acquired, and in general, by educated people known for certain that the soul is immortal; secondly, all revision souls have long been pledged and re-mortgaged in a pawnshop.
"So why didn't you tell me this before? Why did they keep them out of trifles? ”Chichikov said with a heart. “Why, how could I know about it in the first place? This is the benefit of paper production, that now everything, as in the palm of your hand, turned out to be clear ... "
"You're a fool, you stupid brute!" Chichikov thought to himself. - "I dug into the books, but what did I learn?" Past all courtesy and propriety, he grabbed his hat - from home. The coachman stood, the cabs were at the ready and did not put off the horses: a written request would go about the stern, and the resolution - to give out oats to the horses - would come out only the next day "N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, volume two (early edition), chapter three
“In his speeches there was so much knowledge of people and light! He saw many things so well and correctly, so aptly and deftly outlined the neighbors of the landowners in a few words, so clearly saw the shortcomings and mistakes of all ... he was able to convey their slightest habits so originally and aptly that both of them were completely fascinated by his speeches and were ready to admit him for the smartest person.
“Listen,” said Platonov, “how can you, with such a mind, experience and worldly knowledge, not find means to get out of your predicament?”
“There are funds,” said Khlobuev, and after that laid out a whole bunch of projects for them. All of them were so absurd, so strange, they flowed so little from the knowledge of people and the world, that one could only shrug their shoulders: “Lord, God, what an immense distance between the knowledge of the world and the ability to use this knowledge!”. Almost all the projects were based on the need to suddenly get a hundred or two hundred thousand from somewhere ...
"What to do with him" - thought Platonov. He did not yet know that in Rus', in Moscow and other cities, there are such wise men whose life is an inexplicable mystery. Everything seems to have lived, all around in debt, no funds from anywhere, and the dinner that is being asked seems to be the last; and the diners think that tomorrow the host will be dragged to prison. Ten years pass after that - the sage is still holding on in the world, he is even more in debt than before and sets dinner in the same way, and everyone is sure that tomorrow they will drag the owner to prison. The same wise man was Khlobuev. Only in Rus' alone could it exist in this way. Having nothing, he treated and hospitable, and even provided patronage, encouraged all kinds of artists who came to the city, gave them shelter and an apartment ... Sometimes for whole days there was not a crumb in the house, sometimes they asked him such a dinner that would satisfy the taste of the finest deli. The owner appeared festive, cheerful, with the posture of a rich gentleman, with the gait of a man whose life flows in abundance and contentment. But at times there were such difficult minutes (times) that another would hang himself or shoot himself in his place. But he was saved by a religious mood, which in a strange way combined in him with his dissolute life ... And - a strange thing! - almost always came to him ... unexpected help ... "an oligarch of the nineteenth century. Having saved 40 million rubles and decided to save Russia with his own money; however, his methods strongly resemble the creation of a sect. He likes to get into someone else's life "with arms and legs" and guide him on the right path (in his opinion).Has a great gift of persuasion. He also tried to persuade Chichikov, like a lost sheep, to implement his great idea, and under the influence of circumstances, he almost agreed. Persuaded the prince to release Chichikov from prison.“- Do you know, Pyotr Petrovich (Khlobuev)? give me this in my arms - children, affairs; leave your family (wife) too ... After all, your circumstances are such that you are in my hands ... Put on a simple Siberian coat ... yes, with a book in your hands, on a simple cart and go to towns and villages ... (ask for money for the church and collect information about everyone) »
- Vishnepokromov Varvar Nikolaevich
- Khanasarova Alexandra Ivanovna is a very rich old townswoman.
She died, leaving confusion with wills, which Chichikov took advantage of."-" I have, perhaps, a three-millionth aunt, "said Khlobuev," an old devout woman: she gives to churches and monasteries, but helps her neighbor tugen. The youngest of the servants will be about sixty years old, even though she calls him: "Hey, little one!" And they'll enclose it. That's what it is!"
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (Early Edition), Chapter Four
- The legal adviser-philosopher is a very experienced and quirky businessman and chicane with a highly volatile behavior depending on the reward. The shabby appearance creates a contrast to the chic furnishings of his home.
- Samosvistov is an official. "A blowing beast", a reveler, a fighter and a great actor: not so much for a bribe, but for the sake of daring recklessness and mockery of superiors, crank out or, conversely, "wind up" any business. Do not disdain at the same time and dressing up. For thirty thousand in all, he agreed to help out Chichikov, who ended up in prison.
“In wartime, this man would do wonders: he would be sent somewhere to get through impassable, dangerous places, steal a cannon from the enemy right in front of him ... And for lack of a military field ... he dirty and spoiled. Incredible business! he was good with his comrades, he did not sell anyone, and, having taken his word, he kept; but he considered the superiors above himself to be something like an enemy battery, through which you need to break through, taking advantage of any weak spot, gap or omission "
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (early edition), one of the last chapters
At this angry-righteous speech before a sedate assembly, the manuscript breaks off.“... It goes without saying that many innocents will suffer among them. What to do? The case is too dishonorable and cries out for justice... I must now turn to only one insensitive instrument of justice, an ax that must fall on our heads... The fact is that it has come to us to save our land; that our land is already perishing not from the invasion of twenty foreign languages, but from ourselves; that already past the lawful government, another government was formed, much stronger than any lawful one. Their conditions have been established, everything has been assessed, and the prices have even been made known to everyone ... "
N. V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume Two (late edition), one of the last chapters
The beginning of work on the poem dates back to 1835. From Gogol's "Author's Confession", his letters, from the memoirs of his contemporaries, it is known that the plot of this work, as well as the plot of "The Government Inspector", was suggested to him by Pushkin. Pushkin, who was the first to discern the originality and originality of Gogol's talent, which consisted in the ability to "guess a person and make him look like a living person with a few features," advised Gogol to take up a large and serious work. He told him about a rather clever swindler (whom he himself had heard from someone) who was trying to get rich by pledging the dead souls he had bought into the board of trustees as if they were living souls.
Many stories have been preserved about real buyers of dead souls, in particular about Ukrainian landowners of the first third of the 19th century, who quite often resorted to such an “operation” in order to acquire a qualification for the right to distill. Even one distant relative of Gogol was named among this kind of buyers. The purchase and sale of living revision souls was a fact of everyday life, everyday, ordinary. The plot of the poem turned out to be quite vital.
In October 1835, Gogol informed Pushkin: “I started writing Dead Souls. The plot stretched out into a long novel and, it seems, will be very funny.<...>In this novel I would like to show at least one side of the whole "Rus".
This letter shows the task set by the writer. The plot of the conceived "pre-long novel" was mainly built, apparently, more on positions than on characters, with a predominance of a comic, humorous tone rather than a satirical one.
Gogol read the first chapters of his work to Pushkin. He expected that the monsters that came out from under his pen would cause the poet to laugh. In fact, they made a completely different impression on him. "Dead Souls" revealed to Pushkin a new, previously unknown world, horrified him with that impenetrable quagmire, which was the then provincial Russian life. It is not surprising that as he read, says Gogol, Pushkin became more and more gloomy and gloomy, "finally became completely gloomy." When the reading was over, he said in a voice of anguish: “God, how sad is our Russia!” Pushkin's exclamation amazed Gogol, made him take a closer and more serious look at his plan, reconsider the artistic method of processing life's material. He began to think "how to soften the painful impression" that "Dead Souls" could make, how to avoid the "frightening lack of light" in his "long and funny novel." Thinking about his future work, Gogol, reproducing the dark sides of Russian life, interspersing funny phenomena with touching ones, wants to create "a complete essay, where there would be more than one thing to laugh at."
In these statements, although in the embryo, the author's intention is already guessed, along with the dark sides of life, to give the bright, positive ones. But this did not mean at all that the writer wants to find the bright, positive aspects of life without fail in the world of landlord and bureaucratic Russia. Apparently, in the chapters read to Pushkin for Gogol, the author's personal attitude to the depicted was not yet clearly defined, the work was not yet imbued with the spirit of subjectivity due to the lack of a clear ideological and aesthetic concept.
Dead Souls were written abroad (mostly in Rome), where Gogol left after staging The Inspector General in the spring of 1836 in the most dejected and painful state. The waves of turbid and vicious hatred that fell upon the author of The Inspector General from many critics and journalists made an amazing impression on him. It seemed to Gogol that the comedy aroused an unfriendly attitude among all sections of Russian society. Feeling lonely, not appreciated by his compatriots for his good intentions to serve them as a denunciation of untruth, he went abroad.
Gogol's letters allow us to say that he left his native country not in order to survive his insult, but in order to "consider his duties as an author, his future creations" and create "with great reflection." Being far from his homeland, Gogol was connected with Russia with his heart, thought about it, tried to find out about everything that was happening there, turned to friends and acquaintances with a request to inform him about everything that was happening in the country. “My eyes,” he writes, “most often look only at Russia and there is no measure of my love for her.” Immeasurable love for the fatherland inspired Gogol and guided him in his work on Dead Souls. In the name of the prosperity of his native land, the writer intended, with the full force of his civic indignation, to brand the evil, self-interest and untruth that were so deeply rooted in Russia. Gogol was aware that “new classes and many different gentlemen” would rise up against him, but convinced that Russia needed his scourging satire, he worked hard, hard, and persistently on his creation.
Shortly after leaving abroad, Gogol wrote to Zhukovsky: “The dead are flowing alive ... and it completely seems to me as if I were in Russia<...>.. I am completely immersed in Dead Souls.”
If in a letter to Pushkin dated October 7, 1835 Gogol defined "Dead Souls" as a novel basically comic, humorous, then the further the writer's work on the work went, the wider and deeper his idea became. 12 November 1836, he informs Zhukovsky: “I redid everything I started again, thought over the whole plan more and now I’m keeping it calmly, like a chronicle ... If I make this creation the way it needs to be done, then ... what a huge, what an original plot ! What a varied bunch! All Rus' will appear in it!<...>Great is my creation, and it will not end soon.”
So, the genre definition of a work is a poem, its hero is the whole of Rus'. After 16 days, Gogol informs Pogodin: “The thing that I am sitting and working on now, and which I have been thinking about for a long time, and which I will think about for a long time, is not like a story or a novel.<...>If God helps me to fulfill my poem as it should, then this will be my first decent creation: all of Rus' will echo in it. Here the title of the new work given already in the letter to Pushkin is confirmed, and again it is said that this is a poem that will cover all of Rus'. The fact that Gogol wants to give a single complex image of Rus', wants his homeland to appear all “in all its bulk,” he says in 1842 in a letter to Pletnev. The definition of the genre of the future work - the poem - indisputably testified that it was based on a "general Russian scale", that Gogol thinks in terms of national ones. Hence the many common signs that carry a generalizing semantic function, the appearance of such statements as “U us in Rus'" .... "at us not that" ..., "according to our custom "...," what we have there are common rooms”, etc.
So gradually, in the course of the work, “Dead Souls” turned from a novel into a poem about Russian life, where the focus was on the “personality” of Russia, embraced at once from all sides, “in full girth” and holistically.
The hardest blow for Gogol was the death of Pushkin. “My life, my highest pleasure died with him,” we read in his letter to Pogodin. “I didn’t do anything, I didn’t write anything without his advice. He took an oath from me to write." From now on, Gogol considers the work on “Dead Souls” to be the fulfillment of Pushkin’s will: “I must continue the great work that I started, which Pushkin took the word from me to write, whose thought is his creation and which has turned for me from now on into a sacred testament.”
From the diary of A. I. Turgenev it is known that when Gogol was with him in Paris in 1838, he read “excerpts from his novel“ Dead Souls ”. A faithful, living picture in Russia of our bureaucratic, noble life, our statehood ... Ridiculous and painful. In Rome in the same year 1838, Gogol read to Zhukovsky, Shevyrev, Pogodin, who arrived there, chapters about Chichikov's arrival in the city of N, about Manilov, Korobochka.
On September 13, 1839, Gogol arrived in Russia and read four chapters of the manuscript with N. Ya. Prokopovich in St. Petersburg; relationship. Moscow friends enthusiastically greeted the new work and gave a lot of advice. The writer, taking them into account, again began to remake, "re-clean" the already completed edition of the book.
In the spring and summer of 1840 in Rome, Gogol, rewriting the corrected text of Dead Souls, again makes changes and corrections to the manuscript. Repetitions, long lengths are removed, whole new pages, scenes, additional characteristics appear, lyrical digressions are created, individual words and phrases are replaced. Work on the work testifies to the enormous tension and rise of the writer's creative forces: "everything further loomed with him more and more purely, more and more majestic."
In the autumn of 1841, Gogol arrived in Moscow and, while the first six chapters were being whitewashed, he read the remaining five chapters of the first book to the Aksakov family and M. Pogodin. Friends now with special insistence pointed out the one-sided, negative nature of the depiction of Russian life, noted that in the poem only “half of the girth, and not the whole girth” of the Russian world is given. They demanded to show the other, positive side of life in Russia. Gogol, apparently, heeded these advice and made important inserts into the completely rewritten volume. In one of them, Chichikov takes up arms against tailcoats and balls that came from the West, from France, and are contrary to the Russian spirit and Russian nature. In another, a solemn promise is given that in the future, “a formidable blizzard of inspiration will rise and the majestic thunder of other speeches will be heard.
The ideological turning point in Gogol's mind, which began to emerge in the second half of the 1930s, led to the fact that the writer decided to serve his homeland not only by exposing "to general ridicule" everything that defiled and obscured the ideal that a Russian could and should strive for. man, but also showing this ideal itself. Gogol now saw the book in three volumes. The first volume was supposed to capture the shortcomings of Russian life, the people who hinder its development; the second and third are to indicate the ways of the resurrection of "dead souls", even such as Chichikov or Plyushkin. "Dead Souls" turned out to be a work in which pictures of a broad and objective display of Russian life would serve as a direct means of promoting high moral principles. The realist writer became a moralist preacher.
Of the huge plan, Gogol managed to complete only the first part.
In early December 1841, the manuscript for the first volume of Dead Souls was submitted for consideration by the Moscow censorship committee. But rumors that reached Gogol about unfavorable rumors among the members of the committee prompted him to take the manuscript back. In an effort to get "Dead Souls" through the St. Petersburg censorship, he sent the manuscript with Belinsky, who arrived in Moscow at that time, but the St. Petersburg censorship was in no hurry to consider the poem. Gogol waited, full of anxiety and confusion. Finally, in mid-February 1842, permission was obtained to print Dead Souls. However, the censorship changed the title of the work, demanding that it be called "The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls" and thereby seeking to divert the reader's attention from the social problems of the poem, focusing his attention mainly on the adventures of the rogue Chichikov.
Censorship categorically banned The Tale of Captain Kopeikin. Gogol, who cherished it very much and wished to preserve The Tale at all costs, was forced to remake it and shift all the blame for the disasters of Captain Kopeikin on Kopeikin himself, and not on the tsarist minister, indifferent to the fate of ordinary people, as it is was originally.
On May 21, 1842, the first copies of the poem were received, and two days later an announcement appeared in the Moskovskie Vedomosti newspaper that the book had gone on sale.
