“Why, then, portray poverty, yes poverty and the imperfection of our life, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote nooks and crannies of the state?” was how Gogol begins the second volume.

The characters in the second part were not to be quite as bad as in the first volume. “Its continuation is crystalizing in my head clearer and more majestic,” Gogol wrote to his friend, writer Sergei Aksakov. In Gogol’s original plan, the second part was to be akin to Dante’s Purgatorio and the third, respectively, to Paradiso. What was the second volume supposed to be about? Its main character is not so much Chichikov as Russia itself. The novel is considered the pinnacle of Gogol’s work - and one of the main keys to understanding the Russian soul. In addition, the “poem” contains lengthy lyrical digressions about Russia and Russians. Gogol himself called ‘Dead Souls’ a poem, although it was written in prose, but the form of the novel is reminiscent of an ancient poem in which the protagonist, Chichikov, travels through several repeating “circles of hell”, like Odysseus wandering from chimera to chimera. The Kukryniksy (Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiri Krylov, Nikolai Sokolov). Each reacts to this unconventional proposal differently. Chichikov visits local landlords and asks them to sell him these dead souls. So, even if any of the peasants died, the landowner still paid taxes on them and they were listed as living until the next revision. Each landowner in Russia had a list of serfs that was updated only once every few years. So, he decides to resort to a trick facilitated by Russian bureaucracy. However, the problem is that he does not have a single “soul”, that is, he has no serfs. Here is the plot synopsis: A member of minor nobility named Pavel Chichikov arrives in a small town and, in order to gain influence in society, pretends to be a landowner.

Commenting on the first chapters written by Gogol (which were not included in the final version of the first volume), the great poet Alexander Pushkin said: “God, how sad our Russia is!” That was the inferno part and it turned out really good: Gogol depicts a rich palette of bad characters and a wide range of various vices.

It is the first volume, which was printed in 1842, that we know today as ‘Dead Souls’. Russian literature’s most famous satirist planned his most famous work to consist of three parts, in the format of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ - with its own inferno, purgatory and paradise.

Gogol lost souls