Segodnya

Today is the birthday of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (March 31st according to the Old Calendar), born in Great Sorochintsy, Ukraine (1809). His mother was extremely devout, and his father was a bureaucrat who owned a vodka distillery on 3,000 acres and had more than 300 serfs working for him.

After graduating from school, he went off to St. Petersburg, ready to take on the world. First he tried acting, but he failed at his audition. So he wrote an idyllic poem glorifying Germany, and self-published it at his own expense. It got nasty reviews, and he was so ashamed that he bought all the copies, burned them, and decided never to write poetry again.

But eventually he tried writing prose, short stories rooted in the folklore and culture of rural Ukraine, and his first book, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), was a big success. A few years later, he produced a comic play, The Government Inspector (1836). The satirical play mocked the ineptitude of the Russian bureaucracy, but it was extremely popular, and even Czar Nicholas loved it — he is reported to have said, "Everyone gets the business here. Me most of all."

Gogol produced several more books of short stories; his most famous stories include "The Nose," about a nose that takes off on its own, dressed in uniform and acting like any other human being; and "The Overcoat," which has been endlessly interpreted. Dostoevsky is rumored to have said, about himself and his contemporaries: "We all emerged from Gogol's overcoat."

But to me the best of all his works, though unfinished, is his comic novel Dead Souls. 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."

The government would tax the landowners based on how many serfs (or "souls") the landowner owned, determined by the census. Censuses in this period were infrequent, so landowners would often be paying taxes on serfs that were no longer living, thus the "dead souls." It is these dead souls, existing on paper only, that Chichikov seeks to purchase from the landlords in the villages he visits; he merely tells the prospective sellers that he has a use for them, and that the sellers would be better off anyway, since selling them would relieve the present owners of a needless tax burden.

The story is structured in a circular manner as Chichikov visits various estates, encountering caricatures that combine the official failings that Gogol typically satirizes (greed, corruption, paranoia) with a curious set of eccentric and absurd personal quirks.

Chichikov is eventually revealed to be a former mid-level government official fired for corruption and narrowly avoiding jail. His mission to acquire "dead souls" is actually just another one of his "get rich quick" schemes. Once he acquires enough dead souls, he will take out an enormous loan against them and pocket the money.

The novel ends abruptly in mid-sentence. This happened when Gogol became a religious fanatic, the follower of a Russian Orthodox priest who convinced him that all art was sinful. He fasted so severely in his attempt to overcome the Devil that he destroyed his health, and the doctors tried to treat him with leeches, which only further weakened him, and he died at the age of 43.