You can get away with anything if you can make people laugh. Nikolai Gogol got away with a lot. This whole novel is a dirty joke. It’s a dirty joke about old Russia. Although it purports to be a story about nothing, almost a non-story, that very lack of substance is part of the joke.
I said Gogol got away with a lot. “Dead Souls” was published in 1842, during the reign of Czar Nicholas I, a reactionary czar who developed the secret police to a high level. And Czar Nicholas paid attention to literary affairs. So the first thing Gogol got away with was even getting this book published. The second thing is even worse; this book is a kick in the face to old Russia. Its basic message is to ask the question, whether the entire governing regime of old Russia was worth saving.
The title refers to the fact that in old Russia, peasants, or serfs, were referred to as “souls.” They were bought and sold as appurtenances to tracts of land; title to them passed with the land. Thus when an acreage was sold, the sale price included the number of “souls,” or serfs, who resided on the tract. In the novel, this grifter named Tchitchikov, a former civil servant who was fired for graft, comes up with a get-rich-quick scheme. As a former government bureaucrat, he knows that the census is taken every ten years. Between censuses, all the serfs who lived on a piece of land as of the last census are still listed as appurtenances to the land, and the landowner still has to pay property taxes on them, even if they have died. So Tchitchikov gets the idea of going around to visit landowners and purchasing from them all their serfs who have died since the last census. He will then use the title to these serfs as collateral for a large government loan to purchase a rich estate in the Ukraine, and set himself up in business as a wealthy landowner.
Such is the ridiculous premise of what passes for a plot in “Dead Souls.” Tchitchikov starts paying visits to various landowners in a rural district that has recently come through an epidemic, resulting in the deaths of numerous serfs. Each landowner Tchitchikov visits turns out to be more grotesque than the last. One of them is demented. Another is crazy-violent and beats Tchitchikov up. Another is a picture of sloth. Another, who had served in Germany when he was in the army, teaches his serfs to speak German and makes them wear German clothes, in the belief that doing so will make his farm run efficiently like the farms he saw in Germany. Of course, this landowner overlooks just one thing: unlike the independent yeoman-farmers of Germany, Russian peasants are slaves. No amount of pretty clothing and advanced thinking will change that. As I said, this book is a joke, and the joke is on Russia and its ancien regime.
As Tchitchikov proceeds through his list of landowners to be visited, and purchases from each one a large number of deceased peasants, the reader starts to wonder, where is all this leading? What’s the endpoint here? “Dead Souls” is a little bit like “Gulliver’s Travels,” in that its series of visits to strange places has no obvious endpoint and doesn’t really provide the basis for a plot. Gogol seem to be aware of this difficulty. And so he provides an ending, a terminal episode that will bring the “story” (if you can call it that) to a close. During one of Tchitchikov’s visits, a particularly crotchety landowner informs Tchitchikov that a neighboring wealthy widow is about to die without a will. Tchitchikov hits on the idea of having another old lady impersonate the wealthy widow and execute a will in her name, bequeathing all her property to one of Tchitchikov’s accomplices. Unlike Tchitchikov’s main scheme, this deed is clearly illegal. And sure enough, Tchitchikov gets caught. He gets arrested and thrown in jail. A typical sociopath, Tchitchikov weeps and wheedles. And he has friends in high places; they get him sprung. But there’s a quid pro quo: in return for being sprung from jail, Tchitchikov has to leave the area. He needs to disappear. And he does: he disappears into Russia.
“Dead Souls” is great literature because it has many layers of meaning and moral implication. And one of the layers is that Gogol’s joke isn’t just on old Russia. It’s also on us. What if a modern-day Tchitchikov, with a modern-day Gogol looking over his shoulder, visited you? Or me? What pictures of caprice and complicity would emerge from the writer’s acid pen?