“But wise is the man who disdains no character, but with searching glance explores him to the root and cause of all.”

“Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.”

In Gogol’s satirical look at Russian society, Dead Souls refers both to serfs who have died but not yet been recognized as dead by the Census, and the natures of his characters, all of them flawed or caricatures in some way. Gogol’s goal was to capture the flaws and faults of the Russian character, and then in Book 2 provide some insight into solutions. Unfortunately, Gogol was unhappy with Book 2 and burnt it shortly before he died, leaving Book 1 to end mid-sentence: what that says about the Russian character I leave to the reader.

Dead Souls is about a rather untraditional con artist, one attempting to buy dead serfs. In Czarist Russia, the count of serfs under each landowner was established by the census, and if one died between one census and the next, then the landowner has left with a deed of ownership and not much else. Chichikov, our hero, strikes on the idea to buy these dead souls for a pittance and mortgage them for a vast amount of money, then leave with it. Unlike today, when we are lucky enough to have a modern middle class with enough money to be worth stealing from, that meant going to the large rural landowners in search of ones with dead souls to sell. Fortunately, people with dead souls are in abundant supply in Gogol’s epic. Chichikov’s odyssey, and the parallel is intentional, involves repeated, cyclical stops in small town Russia, where he encounters, and indeed personifies, the Russian concept of poshlost: a moral and spiritual vulgarity.

Comedy is a tremendously difficult thing to translate well: jokes rely so much on context and subtle meaning that they almost always fall flat in translation. This translation, the Robert Maguire, very much suffers for it, and I’m not sure if another translation could do better: lacking the background Gogol expected of his readers, much of the satire is lost on me. Still, the book has strengths, and if not replete with laugh out loud moments, there remain some great insights into human nature, always a Russian virtue. I wouldn’t take it over a Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn, but if you like the Russian authors (and I very much do!), he provides a nice change from the better known ones.