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Dead Souls
Ebook Dead Souls
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Amazon.com Review
A socially adept newcomer fluidly inserts himself into an unnamed Russian town, conquering first the drinkers, then the dignitaries. All find him amiable, estimable, agreeable. But what exactly is Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov up to?--something that will soon throw the town "into utter perplexity." After more than a week of entertainment and "passing the time, as they say, very pleasantly," he gets down to business--heading off to call on some landowners. More pleasantries ensue before Chichikov reveals his bizarre plan. He'd like to buy the souls of peasants who have died since the last census. The first landowner looks carefully to see if he's mad, but spots no outward signs. In fact, the scheme is innovative but by no means bonkers. Even though Chichikov will be taxed on the supposed serfs, he will be able to count them as his property and gain the reputation of a gentleman owner. His first victim is happy to give up his souls for free--less tax burden for him. The second, however, knows Chichikov must be up to something, and the third has his servants rough him up. Nonetheless, he prospers. Dead Souls is a feverish anatomy of Russian society (the book was first published in 1842) and human wiles. Its author tosses off thousands of sublime epigrams--including, "However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man," and is equally adept at yearning satire: "Where is he," Gogol interrupts the action, "who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life?" Flannery O'Connor, another writer of dark genius, declared Gogol "necessary along with the light." Though he was hardly the first to envision property as theft, his blend of comic, fantastic moralism is sui generis.--Kerry Fried
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Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club PrizeThe Brothers Karamazov“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.” –New York Times Book Review“It may well be that Dostoevsky’s [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now–and through the medium of [this] new translation–beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” –New York Review of BooksCrime and Punishment“The best [translation] currently available…An especially faithful re-creation…with a coiled-spring kinetic energy… Don’t miss it.” –Washington Post Book World“Reaches as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as is possible in English…The original’s force and frightening immediacy is captured…The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard version.” –Chicago TribuneDemons“The merit in this edition of Demons resides in the technical virtuosity of the translators…They capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life.” –New York Times Book Review“[Pevear and Volokhonsky] have managed to capture and differentiate the characters’ many voices…They come into their own when faced with Dostoevsky’s wonderfully quirky use of varied speech patterns…A capital job of restoration.” –Los Angeles TimesWith an Introduction by Richard Pevear
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Product details
Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 2/23/97 edition (March 25, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679776443
ISBN-13: 978-0679776444
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.8 out of 5 stars
188 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#134,438 in Books (See Top 100 in 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.
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!!
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 Kindle and my Kindle 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 Kindle 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).
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!
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