Dead Souls

Though deliberately absurd and sometimes surreal scenarios, Gogol and his narrator tackle the serious moral question and social problem of corruption and rot—both meanings of the somewhat untranslatable Russian word poshlost.

Chichikov scheme functions mostly because he is one with the corruption around him. He knows whose palms he has to grease—as his backstory shows, one of his main talents is his preternatural understanding of the complex system of bribes that undergirds Imperial Russia’s bureaucracy. He sometimes encounters others who also have a sense of how to make the omnipresent corruption work in their favor: For instance, when Sobakevich sees that Chichikov’s transactions in dead souls skirt the edge of legality, he jacks up the price of his dead souls.

The novel often compares the epidemic of corruption to an existential threat. At first, this concern is presented obliquely, as a source of amusement and dark laughter—for example, when the narrator uses the mock epic literary device to describe Chichikov’s campaign through a series of bribed clerks to register his newly acquired dead souls. This scene culminates with the comparison of the clerk who has just taken Chichikov’s bribe to “one of the priests officiating to Themis” (2740), using the allusion to the Greek goddess of justice to indicate that the opposite of justice is transpiring. Later, the idea that corruption is strangling the country appears more seriously. As Murazov inspires the governor-general to give a speech emphasizing that dealing with corruption is an “earthly duty” (7143), as necessary to survival as was fighting Napoleon’s invasion decades earlier, we see that the danger could erode both individuals and society.

Murazov and Kostanzhoglo are voices against the endemic rot of values and character around them. Unfortunately, their only tools to fight this are setting what they see as a better example of accumulating wealth and exhorting those around them to reform. Kostanzhoglo decries the Industrial Revolution in Europe, disparaging most factories for answering the morally bankrupt demand for consumer goods—“producing lace for city sluts, for streetwalkers” (5879). Murazov, meanwhile, reminds Chichikov that “your destiny was to be a great man, but you have jumped into the abyss and destroyed yourself” (6857). Each may be right, but their words have little effect on Chichikov or anyone else. It is unclear whether the rest of the novel would have undermined them completely, or whether it would have indicated a potential path towards the kinds of reforms they advocate.

As befits a satire, Gogol’s narrator frequently comments on how those Chichikov encounters are emblematic of Russian society’s social ills. Sometimes, the narrator commentary echoes other satires’ concerns. For example, just as Fielding and Thackeray facetiously take their readers to task in advance for not wanting to hear about the travails of the lower classes, Gogol’s narrator pretends to worry his Russian readers will be too preoccupied with his protagonist’s rank to enjoy the work. In a bit of metafictional mockery, he gripes, “a nodding acquaintance with a count or a prince matters more to [a typical Russian] than any close friendly relationship. The author is even worried for his hero, who is a mere collegiate councilor” (322-23). The by-then century old bureaucratic system Gogol writes about created a separate track for status, competing with the birth-based aristocracy and layering new tensions about hierarchical standing into the social fabric.

Gogol’s genre is the picaresque—a narrative in which a protagonist moves from situation to situation without undergoing much internal change, as the author reveals truths about different social milieu or strata. The antiheroic con artist Chichikov moves from estate to estate, encountering landowners whose flattened characters reveal specific flaws that Gogol generalizes into an indictment of the Russian character at large. For example, when Tentetnikov takes himself so seriously that he ruins his chance at happiness, the narrator implies that his inertia and lack of initiative is a national flaw: “Where is the man capable of uttering that all-powerful word ‘Onwards’ in a language that the Russian soul understands?” (4922). This pattern of holding each failed character up as a symptom of greater Russian problems recurs often.

The unintentionally unfinished work leaves the question of whether there is a solution to the troubled national identity unresolved.