Almost, one and a three quarters of a century ago, Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol-Yanovsky or simply, Gogol, himself lend words to the cries of dissent against the likes of him,“Don’t we ourselves know that there’s much in life that’s contemptible and stupid? As it is, we often have occasion to see things that are far from comforting. Better that you show us what’s beautiful and distracting. Better that we should forget ourselves!”That very arrogance and contempt has rocketed far beyond, eulogizing all that is trash and sadly, maybe for the very reason that it is trash. The measure of cinema, at least here in my part of the world is by the millions that it rakes in irrespective of the nature of content, millions are proportional to the trash really or there is that noise which must be called music, not to mention the TV. We all are a part of that and beyond a point not willful perpetrators but just so hard pressed by life that there is little or no time to bother. It struck me the most, Gogol’s desire to produce something of significance, with a potential inclination towards inculcating the seeds of change among the individuals, indirectly goading and exhorting them and to somehow impact positively their lives and times. His self-assessed inability to achieve that coveted goal in writing, to an extent, led him to inflict self-damage by starvation and ultimate demise not to mention the burnings he carried out of his manuscript more than once. The first part of ‘Dead Souls’ leaves you most pleasantly dumbfounded and marveling at the precocious genius of this artist who paints human beings in prose, smiling and even positively laughing alone along with him and then, the second part of the same, incomplete and inconclusive, concluded his life journey quite literally. You wonder, why not just to continue writing with the kind of talent you were bestowed with? But then that is you talking in 2013 where ‘callings’ and ‘inner-voices’ are the last things to determine what and when you do what. Sadly I got to read Gogol saying this,“God had taken away ‘for a long time my ability to create’, as a result of which ‘I have tormented myself, forced myself to write, suffered painfully at the spectacle of my impotence, and several times have made myself ill with the strain and have been unable to accomplish anything, and everything has come out forced and bad.’ ”Pavel Ivanovich ‘Chichikov’, our heroic anti-hero cajoles us to accompany him, on pretty much aimless travels he has undertaken only driven by a supposedly ingenious yet untested and unproven idea of taking advantage of a loophole in the system, which putatively shall translate into real capital and a consequent plum life for his self. He is in fact on the mission to swindle bounty out of the system, keeping low and warding of the reach of law till he attains an un-approachable respectability in the society. He has the gumption to enshroud this trickery in a veil of un-burdening the prospective clients of the burden of ‘dead souls’ or the dead serfs, the tax one is obliged to pay because these serfs are counted as alive on the rolls with no chance of them being ticked of as dead until the subsequent census. He offers to even pay for them, peanuts that is, an item that exists only in thin air and aspires to mortgage them as real serfs while becoming a land-owner himself. Armed with an utterly ingratiating and ‘toady’ character, he ventures thus on his endeavours,“My life can be likened, as it were, to a barque amid the waves, Your Excellency. I was swaddled, and one could say, wrapped in forbearance, myself being, so to speak, forbearance itself.”……….“Somehow the new arrival was never at a loss for anything, and he came across as an experienced man of the world. Whatever the topic of conversation, he always knew how to hold up his end: if the talk was of stud farm, he too would talk of stud farms; if people were chatting of fine dogs, here too he would venture some very sensible observations; if the matter under consideration touched upon an investigation being conducted by the fiscal chamber, he showed that he was not ignorant of judicial hanky-panky; if the discussion turned to billiards, he didn’t let his end down when it came to billiards either; if people were talking about virtue, then he could discourse on virtue very well too, and even with tears in his eyes; if about the distilling of spirits, then he knew a lot about spirits as well; if about custom inspectors and officials, then he could also expiate on them as if he himself had been both an official and an inspector.”The rustic humor of the plot, in the dexterous hands of Gogol, is plied into a tragi-comic satire, one that embraces tightly, ingrained with a power to land hard blows with laughter. Gogol himself appears during the course of narration, monologues and casual talks flow, all of which happens in the ‘meanwhile’ in real time that is, which makes the text delightful. So much so, that even the carriage horses have their say at times. “With us it’s different: we have men so wise that with a landowner who has two hundred souls they will speak in an altogether different way than with one who has three hundred, and with one who has three hundred they will, again, speak otherwise than with one who has five hundred, and with one who has five hundred, again it will be otherwise than with one who has eight hundred; in a word, you can get upto a million, and shadings will still be found.”And then there is this landowner Chichikov meets in his quest to secure ‘dead souls’ whom he ends up describing thus,“His smile was alluring, his hair blond and his eyes light blue. In the first moment of conversation with him, you could not help but say, ‘What a pleasant and kind hearted man!’ The second moment you would say nothing, and the third you would say, ‘The devil only knows what sort of man he is!’ and you would move as far away from him as you could; if you didn’t move away, you would experience a feeling of deadly boredom.”Observing another lady in one of the landowner’s house, he goes ahead with,“And in boarding schools, as we know, three main subjects constitute the foundation of human virtues: the French language, which is indispensable for a happy family life; the piano, for affording one’s spouse some pleasant moments; and finally, in the specifically homemaking skills, the knitting of purses and other surprises.”Oscar Wilde famously said, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you” and Gogol epitomized that perfectly in trying to use comedy as a means towards perfecting individuals, one at a time with an ultimate aim to let that percolate and spread inside the entrails of the country, hopefully enlightening it as a whole. This contrasted starkly with the radicals trying to improve through systemic changes in social structures and government systems. So glaringly, this is the way to go even today and the need all the more acute.Flowing descriptions of the pulchritude of Russian countryside, adorn the second part where Gogol wields a different quill albeit without giving up his knack of humor a wee bit. At times the brilliance is much more vivid and writing candid here than the first part even but only to be rudely reminded of its incompleteness and then it strikes as a disjointed piece on the whole. Perhaps to achieve perspicacity, he forays into the uncharted and flounders, dabbling with morality here and sermons there which do not quite gel with the tone and tenor hitherto attained and that is tragic. “Like a tsar on the day of his solemn coronation, he was all aglow and it seemed as if rays of light were streaming from his face. Why, nowhere in the whole world will you find a delight to equal that. It’s precisely here that man imitates God. God reserved to himself the business of creation, as a delight second to none, and he demands of man that he too, in like measure, be the creator of prosperity all around him. And they call this boring work!”...... “Yes, nature loves patience, and this is a law given it by God himself, who smiles on those who are patient.” (Reminds of Tolstoy)In the final sections, which happen so strangely suddenly, if one is not aware of the fate of this text and its creator, one, to say the least can be left utterly dumbfounded. “….. Why such a fate? Why such blows? Was my life not like a barque amid the waves even without all that? Where is the justice of the heavens? Where is the reward for patience, for exemplary perseverance?”…….“I can see, I can sense….. That the life I’m leading is not right, but I fell no great revulsion towards vice; my nature has grown coarse. I have no love for the good, for that beautiful inclination for doing deeds that are pleasing to God, which becomes second nature, habit.”…….“The dishonest business of taking bribes has become a necessity and a need even for those who were certainly not born to be dishonest. I know by now it is almost impossible for many people to swim against the current.”My own naiveté as regards this work receded only gradually after the reading culminated and shoved me into an earnest quest to know the man himself. My only claims as to the knowledge of this work were cursory references of Dostoevsky and the likes, and I somehow expected it to be miles away from humour let alone comedy forming heart of the matter. I did not know what to expect and that was quite good actually. Gogol’s life and times are enshrouded in dense fog with only his prolific letter writing providing a glimpse into the man and the artist that he was. Pushkin, evidently regarded as a mentor of had a famous falling apart and the two did not talk until Pushkin died in a duel. According to Gogol, it was Pushkin who visualized the ‘plot’ of Dead Souls and decided not to use it himself, encouraging him to amplify and deepen it. And Pushkin argued and coaxed him saying that it was just sinful not to do so, given the ability of Gogol to put his finger on a person and represent him fully as a human being in just a few strokes. Moreover he pushed him to emulate Cervantes, to rise above the scope of smaller works which he was currently writing and produce a work of the character and stature of Don Quixote while overcoming the shortcomings that his frail and capricious health represented. Later Gogol is believed to have said, “ ‘Service’ to Russia, he said, was his abiding concern, and to that end he ‘wanted to present in my work primarily those higher qualities of the Russian nature, which have not yet been justly appreciated by all, and primarily those lower qualities which have not yet been sufficiently ridiculed and dispelled by all’.”Gogol, right from the time of his first writings had a difficult time with criticism, burning text after text even only at slightest behest. His eccentricity and quirkiness culminated with his own life but it can be safely construed that in the present day and age, when goals are secondary, his prodigious precocity as a tragi-comic painter of realities of existence would have levitated him to precipitous heights. Even without that, his role and place in the echelons of Russian or even world writing traditions is incontrovertible, the evidences are replete in Tolstoy, Gorky or Dostoevsky and even Chekhov, who became who they did because he had been…..
Continua il mio viaggio alla scoperta della letteratura russa, sono arrivata a Gogol’ passando da Dostoevskij, ed è proprio il caso di dire meglio tardi che mai.“Le Anime Morte” staziona nella mia libreria dal 2006 quando, mi decisi a comprarlo dietro ispirazione di un personaggio televisivo della serie ‘Gilmore Girls’. Durante la lettura di “Delitto e Castigo” più di una volta si è fatto riferimento a Gogol’, cosi che non ho potuto far altro che pensare fosse un segno, un indizio, per la mia prossima lettura.E’ stato più forte di me confrontare i due stili di scrittura e trovare delle grandi affinità che mi hanno fatto sorridere –come quando ritrovi un vecchio amico- ma anche delle difformità importanti: Dostoevskij raffigura l’umanità in maniera cupa e fortemente introspettiva, non possiamo far altro che sentirci addosso quell’aria afosa e soffocante di Pietroburgo, tanto che quando chiudi le pagine ti riesce difficile, per un po’, riemergere da quell’atmosfera angosciante.Gogol è una sagoma! Il suo stile arguto e caustico posso rintracciarlo solo nei personaggi e nelle storie di Jane Austen, è furbo e pungente e si diverte ad indicarci da un angolino da che parte guardare, e poi se la ride alle nostre spalle come un matto mentre cerchiamo di capire se quello che ci ha mostrato è una buffonata o è la realtà; non gli piace mostrarci la profondità e la sfaccettatura della mente umana, no, lui ci descrive i fatti, e dobbiamo essere noi a capire lo scopo di quello che accade, quali sono le intenzioni dei personaggi, quali sono i buoni, e quali i cattivi. Dostoevskij invece ci alleggerisce il compito, mettendoci di fronte ai fatti già compiuti, a riflessioni già fatte, a posizioni già prese.Gogol’rischia di più lasciando al lettore il libero arbitrio .La sua intraprendenza però, gli costa cara, l’uscita infatti de “Le anime morte” è seguita da moltissime critiche e polemiche; è proprio il suo grande amico Puskin a spiegargli dove ha sbagliato: “nessuno scrittore, prima di lui ha saputo rappresentare con tanta chiarezza la volgarità della vita e dell’uomo banale, nessuno ha descritto con maggior nitidezza tutte quelle piccolezze che sfuggono allo sguardo dei più. Ha spaventato la Russia perché ha mostrato una volgarità senza salvezza e senza tregua."Lui si difende dicendo che non ha descritto i difetti della Russia, ma i propri: ogni personaggio raffigura una bruttura del proprio carattere, li trasferisce nel romanzo e quasi per miracolo riesce a liberarsene. Forse una giustificazione fantasiosa, forse è la verità, ma quello che è certo è che Gogol’ ha scritto un’opera di rottura nella letteratura russa che fino a quel momento sembrava non accorgersi della realtà dei fatti.La sua intenzione era quella di scrivere un grande poema seguendo il modello dantesco, diviso in tre libri, partendo cioè dagli aspetti negativi del popolo russo per arrivare alla salvezza interiore di questi ultimi, una vera e propria evoluzione dall’Inferno fino al Paradiso.Purtroppo “Le Anime Morte” non era destinato ad avere vita facile.Dopo l’uscita del primo volume, Gogol’ rimane impressionato dai giudizi negativi ricevuti, si ammala di esaurimento nervoso ed impiega cinque anni a scrivere il secondo volume che poi brucerà integralmente a causa di una crisi religiosa. Prova a riscriverlo da capo ma non arriverà mai alla fine,il terzo libro non verrà mai alla luce.Seppur incompleto, “Le Anime Morte” è un’opera superba e d’indubbio valore. Il protagonista è caratterizzato da tratti cosi ambigui e destabilizzanti che faticherete a collocarlo all’interno dei vari generi. Il suo obiettivo è quello di crearsi, sulla carta, un buon numero di servitori in modo da farsi assegnare delle terre , così come prevedeva la legge dell’epoca, e quindi arricchirsi. Per arrivare a questo ha intenzione di acquistare, per pochi rubli, le anime morte, ossia i servi della gleba morti tra un censimento e l’altro e per i quali i proprietari dovevano continuare a pagare la tassa governativa fino al censimento successivo. Le anime morte però, sono anche le anime perse, vendute e corrotte che Gogol’ descrive pagina dopo pagina.La lingua è di un'incredibile forza e originalità, le parole assumono una quantità di significati intrecciati che contribuiscono a rendere estremamente densa la lettura dell'opera. Vi esorto a compiere questa lettura perché più che soffermarci sulla trama –che purtroppo è incompleta- credo sia importante indugiare sulle riflessioni che ne scaturiscono. Che poi, pensandoci bene, è il vero scopo della lettura. “Siamo tutti usciti dal cappotto di Gogol.”. F.Dostoevskij
What do You think about Dead Souls (2004)?
للأدب الروسي عبقه الخاص، ففيه من الوصف الدقيق لتفاصيل التفاصيل، والإفراط في العاطفة، والغموض، والفلسلفة ما ينقل القارئ لروح روسيا.تستفرد الرواية بفكرتها، فالبطل الغير مثالي الذي يدعى تشيتشيكوف يسعى لشراء أنفس ميتة. تتابع الأحداث والحكايات إلى أن يكشف المؤلف في أواخر الصفحات عن شخصيه تشيتشيكوف و نظرته حول الطبيعة البشرية. اتفق مع الكاتب وبإعجاب حين يرى ويصور النفس البشرية دون الفضيلة والكمال. فلا فائدة ترجى من تجميل حقائق البشر.مما جاء في أسطر الرواية " فلم يكن بوسعي أن اختار شخصية فاضلة لبطلي. وسأخبركم عن السبب. السبب هو أن قد مر وقت طويل جدا على استعمال كلمة " فقير ، لكنه ذو فضيلة". السبب هو أن كلمة " رجل محترم" أصبحت كلمة مبتذلة. السبب هو أن " الرجل المحترم" قد إنقلب إلى حصان وليس من كاتب إلا ويركبه ويجلده بمناسبة وبغير مناسبة. السبب هو أن " الرجل المحترم" قد أجيع حتى لم تبقى لديه ذبالة من فضيلة ولم يبقى في جسمه إلا الجلد والعظم. السبب هو أن الرجل " الرجل المحترم" يخفى دائما عن الأنظار. السبب هو أن " الرجل المحترم" قد فقد إحترام كل إنسان".كما جاء ايضا " بيد أنكم إذا جلستم هادئين وحيدين وأخذتم تحاسبون أنفسكم، فمن منكم لا يحسن صنعا إذا ما راح يسبر أغوار نفسه ويطرح عليها السؤال الرزين التالي: أليس في عنصر من تشيتشيكوف؟ ولماذا لا يكون ؟ ومن منكم لا يحتمل أن يمر به في الشارع ذات يوم أحد معارفه، فيلكز جاره ويقول بسخريه لا تكاد تخفى " انظر هو ذا تشيتشيكوف! إن الذي مر بنا هو تشيتشيكوف نفسه! "بدأ المؤلف كتابتها منذ 1835، وكأني اسمع صدى صوته الآن بين الكلمات فأصنفها كرواية حية.
—Rasha
Rus romantik akımının öncüsü “Ölü Canlar”, Gogol’un en olgun eseri olmakla beraber; bitirememesi sebebiyle okuyucuyla tam olarak buluşamamış bir yarım başyapıt niteliğinde. Okudukça Gogol’un tamamlayamamış olmasına üzüldüğünüz eserde sadece zamanının Rus insanına değil günümüz insanına dair muhteşem akıcı bir dille yazılmış keskin eleştirileri okuma şansı buluyoruz. Zaman zaman okuyucuyla iletişime geçmekten çekinmeyerek eserin felsefi alt yapısını öne çıkararak eleştirilere cevap veren Gogol’un yarattığı Çiçikov karakteri fazlasıyla orijinal. Hatta karakterin ölü canlar için yaptığı yolcuğun Odysseus’u hatırlattığını söylemekte fayda var. İnsanoğlunun tüm özelliklerini tüm çıplaklığıyla okuyucuya sunan yazarın her sayfayla daha da derinleşen eserinin bitmemiş olması insanlık açısından gerçekten çok büyük bir kayıp. Bunu Hasan Ali Yücel Dizisi'nin dahil ettiği eksik "İkinci Cilt"i bitirince bir kere daha anlıyorsunuz. Kesinlikle okunması gereken eserler arasında.28.05.2015İstanbul, TürkiyeAlp Turgut
—Alp Turgut
We can thank our lucky stars for writer's block, as we'd likely have set fire to the Dead Souls manuscript ourselves if Nikolai Gogol hadn't. Had he, overcome with religious fervor, forged ahead with his plan and complete this three-parter, separated into volumes each of crime, punishment, and redemption, and not starve himself to death, we might've had on our hands a literary misfire it seemed like he, previously so promising, wanted to unleash upon us expectant and unsuspecting masses. Fortunate is everyone, then, that the first (and undeniably best) volume, where Dead Souls plays out its main story, can be taken as more or less self-contained. The second one, while still dazzling in places with great writing, sparkles less so than its predecessor not only because of disjointed chapters, missing words, and lost pages, but also because hints of a crazier and preachier Gogol, already exasperating his friends and fans in real life, start to emerge then in the text. In his later years, he had at one point consoled a critic who had recently lost his wife by this bit of classiness: "Jesus Christ will help you to become a gentleman, which you are neither by education or inclination—she is speaking through me." Another instance: Gogol advised in letters to his readers that "[t]he peasant must not even know that there exist other books besides the Bible." Village priests, he recommended, should accompany them everywhere, and even be made their estate managers. Lovely! It's all a little odd and, considering the incense-smoky shrine to him I'd constructed in my mind after his short stories had so brain-tinglingly won me over, thoroughly disappointing. For all that, on the bright side, what Gogol lit on fire was at least none of the first volume, leading even Vladimir Nabokov to conclude, in his chapter of Lectures on Russian Literature on the author, that "[Gogol] was destroying the labor of long years" not to cleanse himself of the sins he thought his books were, but "because he finally realized that the completed book was untrue to his genius." After that, it's hard to be mad at the guy.Dead Souls is, give or take a few chapters, two-thirds finished. The occasional paragraph, as the pages dwindle nearer to the last, starts trailing off, ellipses replacing periods, with footnotes explaining that that part of the manuscript had been either torn off, burned away, or simply neglected because inspiration for Gogol had then not been forthcoming. The book wraps up in the middle of a character's speech. In the back of my mind did hover that suspicion, which later must've been totally forgotten because the abrupt ending startled me more than any ice-bucket challenge could have. What point could there be for anyone to invest their time in an unfinished work? That strange, self-flagellating class of completists, into which I was dragged screaming and crying from the womb, may answer that question with scandalized looks and resharpened pitchforks. Here's where that forgetfulness so habitual in me came in super-handy: by the time the wispy feeling that things were amiss gained solid form, I was already nose-deep in the thing and left no choice but to, as was already in my nature, push on and knock out the remaining percentages. At that point, whatever the book was, be it a satirical piece, historical-fictional work, or philosophical reflection, I was already thirsty for more. Gogol had me hook, line, and sinker, and all it took was the right combination of unpredictability and creativity to reel me in. "[Gogol], where are you racing to? Give answer! [He] gives no answer... the air rumbles, shattered to pieces, and turns to wind; everything on earth flies by, and, looking askance, other [readers] and [writers] step aside to make way." (Replace the subject, and re-adjust the subsequent changed words accordingly, with Russia, and you'll get part of the gist of what Gogol hoped to say with Dead Souls: that Russia is great, for one, or that it could be. Rather than overbearing, the dedication slots in so naturally alongside the story that both strengthen each other.)In yet another knock-out translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (the last time I'll mention them, honestly, as it should be apparent by now that, where Russian literature matters, my policy is Pevear-Volokhonsky or bust), Gogol puts together a tale of corruption, greed, paranoia, and whatnot—the usual suspects. Chichikov, fat, middle-aged, and charismatic, rides into a town in a britzka one day looking to buy up what are called "dead souls," that is, dead servants who are still taxed as if they were alive because the census hasn't been updated yet. Landowners, Chichikov assumes, would eagerly get rid of such tax burdens, though there's an uphill battle ahead of him: they soon enough sign away their dead weights, but because Chichikov prefers the real reason for his wanting dead souls be kept secret, and because the practice is unprecedented, most of the landowners, each more scene-stealing and absurd than the last, doesn't make the task easy for our "hero." If superstition doesn't stymie his efforts, then either cutthroat business sense or good, old-fashioned suspicion would step in and upset his plans, causing me no end of schadenfreude. Yes, Chichikov has place of honor here as Dead Souls' protagonist, but it's shortly revealed that, really, he's a rainbow of jerk, brought up with dubious morals and self-serving in ways few would expect protagonists of books written in Gogol's time and place to be. The man himself, in one of his many pop-in appearances inside the text, acknowledges that because "the virtuous man has been so worn out that there is not even the ghost of any virtue left in him," it is high "time finally to hitch up a scoundrel" for us readers who "fear the deeply penetrating gaze" and "would prefer not to see human poverty revealed."But speak for yourself, Gogol, as in this day and age, bring on the gloomy truth and color none of it with bright, cheery paints. Ours is a happily cynical generation whose skin crackles and pops, like vampires' in the sun and bacon in the pan, when in proximity with disingenuously optimistic books and their sugary characters. Here, Gogol's characters, Chichikov most of all, are spared none of the harsh spotlight the author indiscriminately aims at them to reveal the ugly pockmarks of their worst traits and truest intentions. The landowners and town officials, from brownnosing Manilov, paranoid Korobochka, and lying Nozdryov to disillusioned Tentetnikov, incompetent Khlobuev, and bureaucratic Koshkarev—not to mention still more characters thrown at you from the myriad and tortuous metaphors only to be snatched away, their purpose served, in the next instant—are lightnings Gogol coaxes towards Dead Souls to electrify it into dancing, buzzing life. And in the center of all that stands Chichikov, whose picaresque antics had me cheering when he got stonewalled and impressed when he outdid himself yet again when it comes to lack of tact—the proper thing to do, dude, when a landowner has suffered a misfortune and lost their serfs is, as opposed to your knee-jerk reaction, not to look so happy about it in front of them. Dead Souls is not immune to slow spots, to be frank, especially where Gogol panders to his dendrological demographic and describes trees in exhaustive detail, though they can be forgiven because they're also brain candy for those who are equally aroused by well-done writing. Even without that, the giant question mark blocking from view the answer to what the dealio was up with Chichikov and his purchased nothings served well enough as the carrot dangling in front of me and powering my progress. "What was this riddle, indeed, what was this riddle of the dead souls? There was no logic whatsoever in dead souls. Why buy dead souls?" Cue petulant foot-stomping. So follows about fifty more questions from the various irritated town inhabitants expressing the same frustrated confusion readers at that point would be feeling. The mystery is fun to poke at and theorize about, but its significance feels tangential: Gogol appears more concerned with capturing that quintessential Russian spirit, not excluding even the pussy zits and bulby warts, encompassing everything from the natural beauty of the countryside and the cool hustle-bustle of industrial living to the quick and piercing wit of its people and their casual and unthinking prejudices. Sexism, ageism, and anti-Semitism are worn on everyone's sleeves. On the country itself, the book points out what we're all thinking: it's "poor, scattered, and comfortless," and "there['s] nothing to seduce or enchant the eye." Look at the majesty of London, the splendor of Paris, and the art of Rome, and what is there in Russia that can be submitted for consideration? Before anyone gives themselves a brain sprain in straining for an answer, Gogol presents his own as a series of striking questions: "But what inconceivable, mysterious force draws one to you?" "What calls, and weeps, and grips the heart?" "Is it not here that the mighty man is to be, where there is room for him to show himself and walk about?" Russia is self-explanatory.Like in his short stories, Gogol can't resist joining in on the action, dispersing writing advice and lamenting about his writerly lot in life on this page, raging against man's idiocy and championing the truth on that page. A lot of the times, it breaks up what could've been monotonous reading, and is all sorts of enlightening and entertaining to read besides. Then, before the page number started drawing my interest more than the book did, a timely sentence of the most pleasing creation and translation jumped out and hooked me back in anew. Dead Souls is even richer in comedy. Chichikov's interactions with the assorted landowners, plus his general shamelessness and amorality, are just up my alley which dead-baby and too-soon jokes, properly executed, have filled it with unexpected snorts. Running gags, too, fall under Gogol's area of easy expertise: "five or six pieces of soap for preserving the freshness of [Chichikov's] cheeks" and "his tailcoat of the flames and smoke of Navarino" are phrases I can't read anymore without breaking out into a grin. A joke that at first seems otherwise would run on for half a dozen pages before someone else interrupts it with the most brilliant of punchlines. A character who's a lawyer gives out legal advice that's illegal to implement. A game of checkers with a cheat goes pear-shaped. Hemorrhoids, for some reason, are constantly mentioned, sending me every time into a state of amused bafflement ("There's that word again.") Multiple times does Gogol emphasize the importance of truth that justifies the hardships writers are sure to face if they "[haven't] clouded people's eye... flattered them wondrously, concealing what is mournful in life, showing them a beautiful man," but boldly do the opposite and take a sledgehammer to their comfortable illusions. A shame he couldn't follow his own advice to the end.
—James
