Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol Books
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Dead Souls is a novel written in 1842 by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. The literature & fiction classic was written to demonstrate the flaws and faults of the Russian mentality and character. Nikolai Gogol masterfully portrays those defects through the novel's main character Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters in his endeavors. The people that he encounters are typical of the Russian middle-class of the time. Nikolai Gogol, despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, destroyed it shortly before his death. The novel ends in mid sentence, but it is usually regarded as complete in the extant form. Dead Souls, initially a Russian regional & cultural best seller, the literature & fiction classicis has become a worldwide best selling book that is often required textbook reading. Dead Souls is a classic literature & fiction novel but it encompasses several other broad fiction genres such as history & criticism.
Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol Books
Ever since I was a kid I always loved astronomy. I remember when Haley's Comet flew by (very disappointing), I remember watching another comet hit Jupiter (much cooler), I will always remember where I was when the Challenger exploded and when the Columbia disintegrated. For a number of years I ever worked with a man who designed, built, and sold telescopes; an eccentric who lived with his wife and 6 kids in a bus on the side of the mountain. When we weren't installing personal 8" mirrors ground by a friend who eventually moved onto to making the mirror for the Next Generation Hubble Space Telescope down in Arizona, he was smoking 2 packs a day, endlessly delaying creditors, yelling at his wife, talking endlessly about how we were all on the cusp of becoming extremely wealthy (something he also told the creditors), and praising Jesus with the local pastor who, I kid you not, believed the angels in the Bible were aliens; he too owned a telescope - a nice $10,000 affair because his church had over 5000 members and so he could afford it.And what the hell does that have to do with Dead Souls?
Two things: 1) People are not as crazy once you get to know them and 2) There's a visual phenomena that happens because of the cones in your eye where if you look directly at a faint star it seems to disappear but if you look slightly away from it it snaps into focus nice and clear.
Let's start with point #2 first. The dead souls in Dead Souls are mostly invisible, they can't be seen because they are, well, dead. There are no dead peasants walking around and taking up space (unlike the land owners who do little more). No, the dead souls can only be seen by looking off to the side a little, to the census, to the graveyard, to people's memories. They exist just out of sight. Yet they are there and they can be quite useful to someone willing to take advantage of them, to 'put them back to work', if you will.
Of course, as we know, it's all very morbid and immoral and our hero eventually pays the price for dealing in such a corruption. Yet that's what someone who is good at corruption relies on - of remaining hidden in plain sight, to deal with everything just off to the side, to be clever to game the system to their advantage and, if one is really talented, make it seem as if you are doing the other person the real favor.
This is one of the points Gogol was trying to make.
Now let's get back to point #1 - the eccentric people and characters.
The funny thing about trying to describe something that is real is that it requires you do so with something that isn't in its place. For example, the 'poshlust' (bad taste) Gogol goes on about in Dead Souls (and whom Nabokov famously infused into his interpretation of the novel) is an untranslatable word in English but well understood in Russian, yet even Russians, when confronted with 'poshlust', would on the one hand recognize it in someone else but probably not in themselves. "Surly I have better taste that that, right?" They would say. In essence it's not even translatable to oneself no matter what language.
So Gogol invented satiric characters to inhabit 'poshlust'. Had he created realistic characters he'd also have to give a sympathetic reason for them engaging in such kitsch. In short, once you actually get to know someone, their bad taste isn't really bad taste anymore, it's their own unique taste. Yet bad taste still exists just like a star you can only see at night by not looking directly at it. The only way to see it clearly is to look off to the side a bit - in this case by looking at a wildly exaggerated character- to see it.
And what if everyone has bad taste? A universal 'poshlust'? Well, it's like trying to define 'art', it's different for everyone and doesn't really have a solid definitive. An elitist would say it's 'the fine arts', the junkyard welder would say something more urban. And they'd both be right because they will only see the bad, the 'poshlust', the corruption, in someone else and not once in themselves.
That's probably why because the way the books ends in the middle of a passionate appeal to morality, the pages are lost and it just ends. There's such futility going on because everyone is corrupt in one way or another, that you might as well buy and sell dead souls to make a living than try and get everyone to do the right thing.
Anyway, the novel is brilliant and is just as relevant today than when it was written over 150 years ago in Russian by someone who didn't even spend that much time living in Russia.
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Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol Books Reviews
I found this book to be hilarious at times, and profound at others. I would consider this more of a comedy than anything else, so don't be fooled by the title. The only knock that I have against the novel is that it is incomplete, through no fault of anyone except time. There is no real closure, and you never really follow our hero off into the sunset. I have read most of the Russian classics and I think this book is a little lighter and more enjoyable to read than many of the other classics. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky can be too intense for some people, but Gogol is a happy medium. I think. Long story short, this novel is a real pleasure to read, and I highly recommend it!
This review, of course, is not of the literary work by Gogol, but of this edition. I do not recommend this edition, particularly when there are so many others available. It includes a lot of information, possibly of interest to academic linguists or professors of semiotics, but on no interest to me or anyone else reading this work as a piece of literature and not interested in how many verbs or nouns are in each chapter, which are the most frequently used proper names and adverbs, etc. Both with my original basic and my Fire I found it almost impossible (and not worth the trouble) to navigate between the footnotes, which explain some the nineteenth century Russian terminology and would have added to my enjoyment of the novel, and the text. In the Fire, when I clicked on the footnote it did NOT bring me to the footnotes section of the book.
As far as the novel itself is concerned, I did enjoy it but please note that Gogol never completed this work, or at least sections of it have been lost. It is interesting as a character study and for historical information about mid-nineteenth century Russian society, before the emancipation of the serfs (the "souls" of the title).
This is quite an exceptional novel, I would say!! A scathing indictment on the complacency and torpor of post-Napoleonic war Russia written in the most deliciously discurssive prose!! The novel takes you through a troika ride (literally) across the impressive landscape of the Russian countryside, as our hero (or antihero) Chichikov visits the homes of various landowners, rounding up as many dead serfs as possible in a hair-brained effort to ascend the societal ladder. We meet a host of peculiar characters along the way, from the boisterous Nozdrev to the reclusive Tientietnikov, all hopelessly without qualities. In the process, the often-unrelable narrator skewers every Russian institution from the bureaucracy to the officials to the serfs in language rich with irony and laugh-out-loud satire. One cannot help but think of the epics of Homer, even down to the use of (hilariously) complicated simile.
In Chichikov, Gogol undoubtedly sees a man of infinite potential, a man with real talents who could make a positive difference in society. Unfortunately, surrounded by corruption and self-indulgence, he succumbs to temptation and chooses instead the path of self-interest. Dogged by nature, Chichikov does not stray from his cause, determined to amass a great fortune no matter whom he must inveigle. The dead souls of the title seem to represent the corruption of Chichikov's soul, as well as that of his mother country at the time. Nevertheless, Gogol does not give up on his character or on Russia, offering the possibility that either may one day from this "dead" state.
While Gogol's novel is on the surface unfinished and at times fragmented, it offers a more unified and cohesive story than do a great many novels that are finished. With good reason does it rank in the Top 35 of greatest novels ever written ( and Top 5 greatest Russian novels ever written). Even the reader who has only time to scan this amazing work will depart with much food for thought, some delightful laughs, as well as a tantalizing curiosity to try sturgeon!!
Ever since I was a kid I always loved astronomy. I remember when Haley's Comet flew by (very disappointing), I remember watching another comet hit Jupiter (much cooler), I will always remember where I was when the Challenger exploded and when the Columbia disintegrated. For a number of years I ever worked with a man who designed, built, and sold telescopes; an eccentric who lived with his wife and 6 kids in a bus on the side of the mountain. When we weren't installing personal 8" mirrors ground by a friend who eventually moved onto to making the mirror for the Next Generation Hubble Space Telescope down in Arizona, he was smoking 2 packs a day, endlessly delaying creditors, yelling at his wife, talking endlessly about how we were all on the cusp of becoming extremely wealthy (something he also told the creditors), and praising Jesus with the local pastor who, I kid you not, believed the angels in the Bible were aliens; he too owned a telescope - a nice $10,000 affair because his church had over 5000 members and so he could afford it.
And what the hell does that have to do with Dead Souls?
Two things 1) People are not as crazy once you get to know them and 2) There's a visual phenomena that happens because of the cones in your eye where if you look directly at a faint star it seems to disappear but if you look slightly away from it it snaps into focus nice and clear.
Let's start with point #2 first. The dead souls in Dead Souls are mostly invisible, they can't be seen because they are, well, dead. There are no dead peasants walking around and taking up space (unlike the land owners who do little more). No, the dead souls can only be seen by looking off to the side a little, to the census, to the graveyard, to people's memories. They exist just out of sight. Yet they are there and they can be quite useful to someone willing to take advantage of them, to 'put them back to work', if you will.
Of course, as we know, it's all very morbid and immoral and our hero eventually pays the price for dealing in such a corruption. Yet that's what someone who is good at corruption relies on - of remaining hidden in plain sight, to deal with everything just off to the side, to be clever to game the system to their advantage and, if one is really talented, make it seem as if you are doing the other person the real favor.
This is one of the points Gogol was trying to make.
Now let's get back to point #1 - the eccentric people and characters.
The funny thing about trying to describe something that is real is that it requires you do so with something that isn't in its place. For example, the 'poshlust' (bad taste) Gogol goes on about in Dead Souls (and whom Nabokov famously infused into his interpretation of the novel) is an untranslatable word in English but well understood in Russian, yet even Russians, when confronted with 'poshlust', would on the one hand recognize it in someone else but probably not in themselves. "Surly I have better taste that that, right?" They would say. In essence it's not even translatable to oneself no matter what language.
So Gogol invented satiric characters to inhabit 'poshlust'. Had he created realistic characters he'd also have to give a sympathetic reason for them engaging in such kitsch. In short, once you actually get to know someone, their bad taste isn't really bad taste anymore, it's their own unique taste. Yet bad taste still exists just like a star you can only see at night by not looking directly at it. The only way to see it clearly is to look off to the side a bit - in this case by looking at a wildly exaggerated character- to see it.
And what if everyone has bad taste? A universal 'poshlust'? Well, it's like trying to define 'art', it's different for everyone and doesn't really have a solid definitive. An elitist would say it's 'the fine arts', the junkyard welder would say something more urban. And they'd both be right because they will only see the bad, the 'poshlust', the corruption, in someone else and not once in themselves.
That's probably why because the way the books ends in the middle of a passionate appeal to morality, the pages are lost and it just ends. There's such futility going on because everyone is corrupt in one way or another, that you might as well buy and sell dead souls to make a living than try and get everyone to do the right thing.
Anyway, the novel is brilliant and is just as relevant today than when it was written over 150 years ago in Russian by someone who didn't even spend that much time living in Russia.
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