Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol". Penguin Classics. 2004-07-29. Archived from the original on January 27, 2013 . Retrieved 2013-04-22. Of all Gogol's creations, Chichikov stands out as the incarnation of the complacent poshlost. Other characters—the squires Chichikov visits on his shady business—include: Sobakevich, a strong, silent, economical man; Manilov, a sentimentalist with pursed lips; M-me Korobochka, a widow; Nozdryov, a bully. Plyushkin, the miser, appears to transcend the poshlost archetype in that he is not complacent but miserable. [7] Plot [ edit ] Book One [ edit ]

In the process we learn about life in Russia at the time: masters and peasants He travels by coach with two servants and goes to a lot of taverns gambling. Each negotiation to buy serfs is different. We attend high society balls. The author comments a lot on language – Russian and French; the provinces vs. the cities and “we Russians” vs. French, British, Germans and English. There’s humor but ultimately hopelessness of ever changing the conditions of serfdom. I propose to acquire dead ones, who would, however, be counted in the census as living,” said Chichikov.

PREPARER’S NOTE

Everywhere Gogol describes a world of incandescent inanity. Things may look fascinating, variegated, and endlessly interesting, as the narrators of his stories sometimes suggest at their beginnings, but by the end the world’s metaphysical boredom shines through. As the narrator of “Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich” leaves the town where the eponymous heroes have been quarreling for years about utter triviality, he reflects, This isn't that kind of a supernatural book though, buying dead souls (the title was originally censored because as the Church teaches souls are immortal and can't be dead) was a reasonable financial undertaking at the time. Serfs could be mortgaged by their owners. Censuses in Imperial Russia were only undertaken once every twenty-five years and peasants who had died since the last one enjoyed a strange half-life in which they could still be mortgaged even though as assets they were completely non-liquid (at least financially speaking) since they were securely lodged in the graveyard. So we find our hero, or "hero", travelling about, meeting various members of the nobility and attempting to buy their dead souls from them.

The story follows the exploits of Chichikov, a middle-aged gentleman of middling social class and means. Chichikov arrives in a small town and turns on the charm to woo key local officials and landowners. He reveals little about his past, or his purpose, as he sets about carrying out his bizarre and mysterious plan to acquire "dead souls." And finally there's Plyushkin, who has suffered about as much travail as Job. Needless to say, he's eager to sell his dead souls to Chichikov. What there is of the first part is generally read as a comedy. It is funny, but bear in mind that the first part is about a young man travelling around in rural Russia in the 1820s buying the souls of dead peasants from their masters. What did I tell her to do? I told her to do what I did. Pretend you’re rich. Hire a lawyer. Open a credit card, if you have to. A meager amount of wealth will insulate you from a lifetime of woe, exactly as it was designed to. All my lawyer had to do was send a memo on official letterhead and my mother’s debts in death dropped 90 percent. More than a quarter of a million dollars was erased in an instant—an accounting that five weeks of my pleading, bargaining, reasoning, denying, uploading, scanning, begging, faxing, and crying had not been able to extract. La obra de Gógol no es tan extensa como la de otros autores rusos, pero marcó a fuego con su talento narrativo a todas las generaciones subsiguientes en su país y destaco entre todos ellos a Fiódor Dostoievski quien ya había acuñado su frase "Todos descendemos del capote de Gógol" y a Lev Tolstoi, quien seguramente se haya inspirado en esta extensa novela para escribir uno de sus cuentos más geniales, me refiero a "Cuánta tierra necesita un hombre" en donde emparenta el afán de conseguir tierras del personaje principal, Pajom con la obsesión de Chichikov por comprar almas muertas.

Nikolai Gogol, the Ukrainian godfather of Russian literature. Considered a leading figure in Russian literary realism, a title and movement he rejected, hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as the greatest writer Russia has ever produced, he has influenced the writings of generations of Russian writers from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Mikhail Bulgakov. One of literatures great contradictions, Gogol is a Ukrainian hailed a Great Russian, a celebrated Realist who wrote surrealist masterpieces. In fact the life of Gogol reads like one of his stories. A writer celebrated for founding a movement he wants no part of sets out to write a piece rivaling Dante’s The Divine Comedy or Homer’s The Odyssey, only to die before its completion. If as critics suggest The Overcoat symbolizes Gogol’s literary genius then Dead Souls has become the symbol of the author’s descent into madness. Representing perhaps an Icarus moment where life imitates art, does Gogol’s notorious masterpiece really define one of literatures true originals, or is it an extreme case of the ‘tortured artist’ romanticized?

Selifan is Chichikov's carriage driver. He is frequently inebriated while driving. The Governor's Daughter Returning to town with his four hundred dead souls, Chichikov is ecstatic. But he soon becomes the object of nasty gossip. Chichikov had bought these souls to raise his social standing and his net worth. But he is now seen as a grifter and must flee for his life. Although the townspeople Chichikov comes across are gross caricatures, they are not flat stereotypes by any means. Instead, each is neurotically individual, combining the official failings that Gogol typically satirizes (greed, corruption, paranoia) with a curious set of personal quirks. Our hero, the hero of this novel, as is defined in the beginning, is peripatetic rouge and is very solicitous about his descendants. Our hero is a traveler but his travel is of a different sort. One day our hero CHICHIKOV enters in a provincial city of N. Gogol has constantly used this term ‘our hero’ everywhere in the narration, whenever he had a strong intent to peep out in between the storyline and wanted to talk to the reader directly, this ‘our hero’ of Gogol, though acts throughout the book villainously. He entered in style on a pretty brichka (a type of horse-drawn carriage) and entered the gate of a hostelry in this city…And thus began his journey in this novel Dead souls.Chichikov es un hombre refinado, pero taimado, tiene una avaricia por la compra de almas que lo transforma en un comprador lisonjero y astuto y es capaz de hacer cualquier cosa con tal de conseguir lo que quiere. Él va atravesando ciudades (aunque gran parte de la novela sucede en la ciudad de N.), en su calesín acompañado de su lacayo Petrushka y su cochero Selifan que ofician como dos Sancho Panza de menor injerencia que el famoso personaje español. Nozdryov is another landowner from whom Chichikov is trying to buy dead peasant souls. Nozdryov is a widower, left with two kids he has no interest in so leaves them to the nanny. He's a frivolous party animal who loves cards and is always getting into fights and getting tossed from social gatherings. He's also a pathological liar. Though he seems brisk and energetic, he's glib, has no ideas and plans nothing. He's just passing through like another dead soul.

Almas Muertas, por consiguiente es un libro largo, de apretadas y densas líneas, pero que son necesarias para desplegar toda la historia de Chichikov, este hombre tan particular que fatiga las estepas rusas en busca de hacendados que le vendan las almas, es decir los campesinos, que tienen en su poder y que han muerto pero que todavía aparecen en el Censo como vivos que realizaba el Estado ruso entre los terratenientes. En su obra encontramos sus cuentos más inmortales como "El Capote", "La Naríz", "Viy", "Diario de un Loco", esta novela, "Tarás Bulba" y obras de teatro "El Inspector", las cuales son pruebas inequívocas de su maestría literaria. Pliushkin is the final person who Chichikov buys souls from. He is described as being greedy and cruel. The narrator says that when his wife was alive he was much more kind and generous. After her death, he became obsessed with money and treated his servants and children with suspicion and stinginess. SelifanBut allow me to ask you,” said Manilov, “how do you wish to buy them: with land, or simply to have them resettled – that is, without land?” Word gets around town about Chichikov's plan and people speculate about the possibility of Chichikov being very wealthy. Chichikov is invited to a ball and many women take an interest in him. He talks to the young woman he saw on the road and learns that she is the governor's daughter. Nozdriov arrives at the ball and begins screaming about Chichikov's schemes. After the ball, a rumor spreads that Chichikov is scheming to kidnap the governor's daughter. Suspicions about Chichikov mount and he is barred from entering a number of places. He learns that his name has been tarnished and leaves town. From my vantage point, the only parts of Dead Souls that seem to be rooted in something other than realism are the moments when Chichikov imagines the lives of the souls he’s collected. He can’t seem to stop himself from reading a name and wondering about that person’s existence: Petrushka the flunky…began settling himself in the tiny anteroom…whither he had already brought…a certain odor all his own, which had been also imparted to the bag he brought in next, containing sundry flunkyish effects. A character in Dead Souls reads anything thrust into his hands because understanding is beside the point: what he loves is “the very process of reading—look and behold ye, some word or other inevitably emerged from out of the welter of letters, even though, at times, the Devil alone knew what that word meant.”