“Dead Souls” is a work by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, the genre of which the author himself designated as a poem. It was originally conceived as a three-volume work. The first volume was published in 1842. The almost finished second volume was destroyed by the writer, but several chapters were preserved in drafts. The third volume was conceived and not started, only some information about it remained.

Gogol began work on Dead Souls in 1835. At this time, the writer dreamed of creating a large epic work dedicated to Russia. A.S. Pushkin, who was one of the first to appreciate the uniqueness of Nikolai Vasilyevich’s talent, advised him to take up a serious essay and suggested an interesting plot. He told Gogol about one clever swindler who tried to get rich by pawning the dead souls he bought as living souls on the board of guardians. At that time, many stories were known about real buyers of dead souls. One of Gogol’s relatives was also named among such buyers. The plot of the poem was prompted by reality.

“Pushkin found,” Gogol wrote, “that such a plot of Dead Souls is good for me because it gives me complete freedom to travel all over Russia with the hero and bring out many different characters.” Gogol himself believed that in order “to find out what Russia is today, you must certainly travel around it yourself.” In October 1835, Gogol reported to Pushkin: “I began to write Dead Souls. The plot stretches out into a long novel and, it seems, will be very funny. But now I stopped it on the third chapter. I'm looking for a good sneaker with whom I can get along briefly. In this novel I want to show at least one side of all of Rus'.”

Gogol anxiously read the first chapters of his new work to Pushkin, expecting that they would make him laugh. But, having finished reading, Gogol discovered that the poet became gloomy and said: “God, how sad our Russia is!” This exclamation forced Gogol to take a different look at his plan and rework the material. In further work, he tried to soften the painful impression that “Dead Souls” could have made - he alternated funny phenomena with sad ones.

Most of the work was created abroad, mainly in Rome, where Gogol tried to get rid of the impression made by the attacks of critics after the production of The Inspector General. Being far from his homeland, the writer felt an inextricable connection with it, and only love for Russia was the source of his creativity.

At the beginning of his work, Gogol defined his novel as comic and humorous, but gradually his plan became more complex. In the fall of 1836, he wrote to Zhukovsky: “I redid everything that I started again, I thought about the whole plan and now I am writing it calmly, like a chronicle... If I complete this creation the way it needs to be done, then... how huge, how original plot!.. All Rus' will appear in it!” Thus, in the course of the work, the genre of the work was determined - the poem, and its hero - all of Rus'. At the center of the work was the “personality” of Russia in all the diversity of its life.

After the death of Pushkin, which was a heavy blow for Gogol, the writer considered the work on “Dead Souls” a spiritual covenant, the fulfillment of the will of the great poet: “I must continue the great work that I began, which Pushkin took from me to write, whose thought is his creation and which from now on turned into a sacred testament for me.”

Pushkin and Gogol. Fragment of the monument to the Millennium of Russia in Veliky Novgorod.
Sculptor. I.N. Shredder

In the fall of 1839, Gogol returned to Russia and read several chapters in Moscow from S.T. Aksakov, with whose family he became friends at that time. Friends liked what they heard, they gave the writer some advice, and he made the necessary amendments and changes to the manuscript. In 1840 in Italy, Gogol repeatedly rewrote the text of the poem, continuing to work hard on the composition and images of the characters, and lyrical digressions. In the fall of 1841, the writer returned to Moscow again and read the remaining five chapters of the first book to his friends. This time they noticed that the poem showed only the negative sides of Russian life. Having listened to their opinion, Gogol made important insertions into the already rewritten volume.

In the 30s, when an ideological turning point was outlined in Gogol’s consciousness, he came to the conclusion that a real writer must not only put on public display everything that darkens and obscures the ideal, but also show this ideal. He decided to embody his idea in three volumes of Dead Souls. In the first volume, according to his plans, the shortcomings of Russian life were to be captured, and in the second and third the ways of resurrecting “dead souls” were shown. According to the writer himself, the first volume of Dead Souls is just “a porch to a vast building,” the second and third volumes are purgatory and rebirth. But, unfortunately, the writer managed to realize only the first part of his idea.

In December 1841, the manuscript was ready for publication, but censorship prohibited its release. Gogol was depressed and looked for a way out of this situation. Secretly from his Moscow friends, he turned for help to Belinsky, who arrived in Moscow at that time. The critic promised to help Gogol, and a few days later he left for St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg censors gave permission to publish “Dead Souls,” but demanded that the title of the work be changed to “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls.” In this way, they sought to divert the reader’s attention from social problems and switch it to the adventures of Chichikov.

“The Tale of Captain Kopeikin,” which is plot-related to the poem and is of great importance for revealing the ideological and artistic meaning of the work, was categorically banned by censorship. And Gogol, who treasured it and did not regret giving it up, was forced to rework the plot. In the original version, he laid the blame for the disasters of Captain Kopeikin on the tsar’s minister, who was indifferent to the fate of ordinary people. After the alteration, all the blame was attributed to Kopeikin himself.

Even before receiving the censored copy, the manuscript began to be typed at the printing house of Moscow University. Gogol himself undertook to design the cover of the novel, writing in small letters “The Adventures of Chichikov, or” and in large letters “Dead Souls.”

On June 11, 1842, the book went on sale and, according to contemporaries, was sold out like hot cakes. Readers immediately divided into two camps - supporters of the writer’s views and those who recognized themselves in the characters of the poem. The latter, mainly landowners and officials, immediately attacked the writer, and the poem itself found itself at the center of the journal-critical struggle of the 40s.

After the release of the first volume, Gogol devoted himself entirely to work on the second (begun back in 1840). Each page was created tensely and painfully; everything written seemed to the writer to be far from perfect. In the summer of 1845, during a worsening illness, Gogol burned the manuscript of this volume. Later, he explained his action by the fact that the “paths and roads” to the ideal, the revival of the human spirit, did not receive sufficiently truthful and convincing expression. Gogol dreamed of regenerating people through direct instruction, but he could not - he never saw the ideal “resurrected” people. However, his literary endeavor was later continued by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who were able to show the rebirth of man, his resurrection from the reality that Gogol so vividly depicted.

Draft manuscripts of four chapters of the second volume (in incomplete form) were discovered during the opening of the writer’s papers, sealed after his death. The autopsy was performed on April 28, 1852 by S.P. Shevyrev, Count A.P. Tolstoy and Moscow civil governor Ivan Kapnist (son of the poet and playwright V.V. Kapnist). The whitewashing of the manuscripts was carried out by Shevyrev, who also took care of their publication. Lists of the second volume were distributed even before its publication. For the first time, the surviving chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls were published as part of the Complete Works of Gogol in the summer of 1855.

February 24, 1852 Nikolay Gogol burned the second, final edition of the second volume of “Dead Souls” - the main work in his life (he also destroyed the first edition seven years earlier). It was Lent, the writer ate practically nothing, and the only person he gave to read his manuscript called the novel “harmful” and advised him to destroy a number of chapters from it. The author threw the entire manuscript into the fire at once. And the next morning, realizing what he had done, he regretted his impulse, but it was too late.

But the first few chapters of the second volume are still familiar to readers. A couple of months after Gogol’s death, his draft manuscripts were discovered, including four chapters for the second book of Dead Souls. AiF.ru tells the story of both volumes of one of the most famous Russian books.

The title page of the first edition of 1842 and the title page of the second edition of “Dead Souls” of 1846, based on a sketch by Nikolai Gogol. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

Thanks to Alexander Sergeevich!

In fact, the plot of “Dead Souls” does not belong to Gogol at all: he suggested an interesting idea to his “colleague of the writer” Alexander Pushkin. During his exile in Chisinau, the poet heard an “outlandish” story: it turned out that in one place on the Dniester, judging by official documents, no one had died for several years. There was no mysticism in this: the names of the dead were simply assigned to runaway peasants who, in search of a better life, found themselves on the Dniester. So it turned out that the city received an influx of new labor, the peasants had a chance for a new life (and the police could not even identify the fugitives), and statistics showed the absence of deaths.

Having slightly modified this plot, Pushkin told it to Gogol - this most likely happened in the fall of 1831. And four years later, on October 7, 1835, Nikolai Vasilyevich sent Alexander Sergeevich a letter with the following words: “I started writing Dead Souls.” The plot stretches out into a long novel and, it seems, will be very funny.” Gogol's main character is an adventurer who pretends to be a landowner and buys up dead peasants who are still listed as living in the census. And he pawns the resulting “souls” in a pawnshop, trying to get rich.

Three circles of Chichikov

Gogol decided to make his poem (and this is how the author designated the genre of “Dead Souls”) three-part - in this the work is reminiscent of “The Divine Comedy” Dante Alighieri. In Dante's medieval poem, the hero travels through the afterlife: he goes through all the circles of hell, passes through purgatory and, in the end, having become enlightened, ends up in heaven. Gogol's plot and structure are conceived in a similar way: the main character, Chichikov, travels across Russia, observing the vices of the landowners, and gradually changes himself. If in the first volume Chichikov appears as a clever schemer who is able to gain the trust of any person, then in the second he is caught in a scam with someone else's inheritance and almost goes to prison. Most likely, the author assumed that in the final part his hero would end up in Siberia along with several other characters, and after going through a series of tests, together they would become honest people and role models.

But Gogol never began writing the third volume, and the contents of the second can only be guessed from the four surviving chapters. Moreover, these records are working and incomplete, and the characters have “different” names and ages.

"Sacred Testament" of Pushkin

In total, Gogol wrote the first volume of Dead Souls (the same one that we now know so well) for six years. The work began in his homeland, then continued abroad (the writer “went there” in the summer of 1836) - by the way, the writer read the first chapters to his “inspiration” Pushkin just before leaving. The author worked on the poem in Switzerland, France and Italy. Then he returned to Russia in short “forays,” read excerpts from the manuscript at social evenings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then went abroad again. In 1837, Gogol received news that shocked him: Pushkin was killed in a duel. The writer considered that it was now his duty to finish “Dead Souls”: thereby he would fulfill the “sacred will” of the poet, and he set to work even more diligently.

By the summer of 1841, the book was completed. The author came to Moscow planning to publish the work, but encountered serious difficulties. Moscow censorship did not want to let “Dead Souls” through and was going to ban the poem from publication. Apparently, the censor who “got” the manuscript helped Gogol and warned him about the problem, so that the writer managed to transport “Dead Souls” through Vissarion Belinsky(literary critic and publicist) from Moscow to the capital - St. Petersburg. At the same time, the author asked Belinsky and several of his influential friends from the capital to help pass censorship. And the plan was a success: the book was allowed. In 1842, the work was finally published - then it was called “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, a poem by N. Gogol.”

Illustration by Pyotr Sokolov for Nikolai Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls.” "Chichikov's arrival to Plyushkin." 1952 Reproduction. Photo: RIA Novosti / Ozersky

First edition of the second volume

It is impossible to say for sure when exactly the author began writing the second volume - presumably, this happened in 1840, even before the first part was published. It is known that Gogol worked on the manuscript again in Europe, and in 1845, during a mental crisis, he threw all the sheets into the oven - this was the first time he destroyed the manuscript of the second volume. Then the author decided that his calling was to serve God in the literary field, and came to the conclusion that he had been chosen to create a great masterpiece. As Gogol wrote to his friends while working on “Dead Souls”: “... it is a sin, a strong sin, a grave sin to distract me! Only one person who does not believe my words and is inaccessible to lofty thoughts is allowed to do this. My work is great, my feat is saving. I am now dead to everything petty.”

According to the author himself, after burning the manuscript of the second volume, insight came to him. He realized what the content of the book should really be: more sublime and “enlightened.” And inspired Gogol began the second edition.

Character illustrations that have become classics
Works by Alexander Agin for the first volume
Nozdryov	Sobakevich	Plyushkin	Ladies
Works by Peter Boklevsky for the first volume
Nozdryov	Sobakevich	Plyushkin	Manilov
Works by Peter Boklevsky and I. Mankovsky for the second volume
Peter Rooster	Tentetnikov	General Betrishchev	Alexander Petrovich

"Now it's all gone." Second edition of the second volume

When the next, already second, manuscript of the second volume was ready, the writer persuaded his spiritual teacher, Rzhevsky Archpriest Matthew Konstantinovsky read it - the priest was just visiting Moscow at that time, in the house of a friend of Gogol. Matthew initially refused, but after reading the edition, he advised that several chapters be destroyed from the book and never published. A few days later, the archpriest left, and the writer practically stopped eating - and this happened 5 days before the start of Lent.

Portrait of Nikolai Gogol for his mother, painted by Fyodor Moller in 1841, in Rome.

According to legend, on the night of February 23-24, Gogol woke up his Semyon's servant, ordered him to open the stove valves and bring the briefcase in which the manuscripts were kept. To the pleas of the frightened servant, the writer replied: “It’s none of your business! Pray!” - and set fire to his notebooks in the fireplace. No one living today can know what motivated the author then: dissatisfaction with the second volume, disappointment or psychological stress. As the writer himself later explained, he destroyed the book by mistake: “I wanted to burn some things that had been prepared for a long time, but I burned everything. How strong the evil one is - that’s what he brought me to! And I understood and presented a lot of useful things there... I thought I would send out a notebook to my friends as a souvenir: let them do what they wanted. Now everything is gone."

After that fateful night, the classic lived for nine days. He died in a state of severe exhaustion and without strength, but until the last he refused to take food. While sorting through his archives, a couple of Gogol's friends, in the presence of the Moscow civil governor, found the draft chapters of the second volume a couple of months later. He didn’t even have time to start the third... Now, 162 years later, “Dead Souls” is still read, and the work is considered a classic not only of Russian, but of all world literature.

"Dead Souls" in ten quotes

“Rus, where are you going? Give an answer. Doesn't give an answer."

“And what Russian doesn’t like driving fast?”

“There is only one decent person there: the prosecutor; and even that one, to tell the truth, is a pig.”

“Love us black, and everyone will love us white.”

“Oh, Russian people! He doesn’t like to die his own death!”

“There are people who have a passion to spoil their neighbors, sometimes for no reason at all.”

“Often, through the laughter visible to the world, tears flow invisible to the world.”

“Nozdryov was in some respects a historical person. Not a single meeting where he attended was complete without a story.”

“It is very dangerous to look deeper into women’s hearts.”

“Fear is stickier than the plague.”

Illustration by Pyotr Sokolov for Nikolai Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls.” "Chichikov at Plyushkin's." 1952 Reproduction. Photo: RIA Novosti / Ozersky

History of Russian literature of the 19th century. Part 1. 1800-1830s Lebedev Yuri Vladimirovich

Creative history of Gogol's poem "Dead Souls".

The plot of the poem was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin, who witnessed fraudulent transactions with “dead souls” during his exile in Chisinau. At the beginning of the 19th century, thousands of peasants fled from different parts of the country to the south of Russia, to Bessarabia, fleeing their cruel landowners. They were caught and brought back to their place. But cunning men found a way out: they changed their first and last names to the peasants and townspeople who died in the south. For example, it was discovered that the city of Bendery is inhabited by “immortal” people: for many years not a single death was registered there, because it was customary not to exclude the dead “from society,” and their names were given to the peasants who arrived here: the local owners received an influx of manpower was beneficial.

The plot of the poem was how a clever rogue found a dizzyingly bold way of getting rich in Russian conditions. Under serfdom, peasants were assigned to the landowners as labor force and individuals as their subjects. Landowners paid taxes to the state for every peasant, or, as they said then, for every peasant soul. State audits of these souls were carried out rarely - once every 12-15 years, and landowners contributed money for years for long-dead peasants. On paper they still existed, but in reality they were “dead souls.”

The hero of the poem, Chichikov, decides to commit such a scam: for a cheap sum, he buys up “dead souls” from landowners, declares them resettled to the south, in the Kherson province, and pledges an imaginary estate to the state for 100 rubles per soul. He then declares them dead en masse from the epidemic and pockets the money they receive. For one thousand “dead souls” he receives a net income of 100 thousand rubles.

Gogol began work on the poem in the fall of 1835, before he began The Inspector General. In the same letter in which Gogol asks Pushkin for a plot for a comedy, he says: “I began to write Dead Souls. The plot stretches out into a long novel and, it seems, will be funny... In this novel I want to show at least from one side all of Rus'.” In this letter, Gogol also calls “Dead Souls” a novel, specifically emphasizing that it lacks the desire to capture the fullness of Russian life with images. Gogol’s goal is different - to show only the dark sides of life, collecting them, as in “The Inspector General,” “in one pile.”

Before leaving abroad, Gogol introduced Pushkin to the beginning of his work: “...When I began to read to Pushkin the first chapters of “Dead Souls” in the form they were before, then Pushkin, who always laughed when I read (he was also a hunter for laughter), began to gradually become gloomier, gloomier, and finally became completely gloomy. When the reading ended, he said in a voice of melancholy: “God, how sad our Russia is!”

Obviously, Gogol was alarmed by Pushkin’s reaction: after all, with his criticism he wanted to have a cleansing effect on the reader’s soul. The failure with The Inspector General further strengthened Gogol in the correctness of his doubts. And abroad, the writer begins to finalize the already written chapters. In a letter to Zhukovsky in November 1836, he reports: “...I started working on Dead Souls, which I started in St. Petersburg. I redid everything I started again, thought over the whole plan and now I write it calmly, like a chronicle... If I complete this creation the way it needs to be done, then... what a huge, what an original plot! What a varied bunch! All Rus' will appear in it!”

According to K.V. Mochulsky, “the production of The Inspector General, perceived as a defeat, forced him to reevaluate his work. Gogol was faced with a question: why did his compatriots not understand him? Why did “entire classes” rebel against him? And he answered this: my fault. Everything he had previously written was childish: he did not take his calling as a writer seriously and was careless with laughter... Now he knows how dangerous the one-sidedness of the image is, and sets himself the goal of completeness. All of Russia should be reflected in the poem.” Now he decides to give the story of Chichikov’s journey a national scale. The plot about the tricks of the swindler and the adventurer remains, but the characters of the landowners come to the fore, recreated slowly and with epic completeness, incorporating phenomena of all-Russian significance (“Manilovschina”, “Nozdrevschina”, “Chichikovschina”). The very narrative about them acquires a chronicle character, claiming to be a comprehensive recreation of Russian life, transferring the writer’s interest from adventurous intrigue to a deep analysis of the contradictions of Russian life in their broad historical perspective.

The initial plan to show Rus' “from one side” gives way to a more voluminous and complex task: along with all the bad, “to expose to the eyes of the people” all the good that gives hope for a future national revival. Gogol associates this revival not with social changes, but with the spiritual transformation of Russian life. He explains social vices by the spiritual death of people. The title “Dead Souls” takes on a symbolic meaning for him.

Gogol is convinced that the socio-historical life of a nation is connected by thousands of invisible threads with the mental state of each person; it consists of little things. It is in the little things of everyday life, in their contradictory diversity, that both positive and negative aspirations of social existence are formed, both the ideal, “straight path”, and “deviations” from it. Hence, on the pages of Dead Souls a rare combination of “fractional, detailed artistic analysis” with the scale and breadth of artistic generalizations appears.

The genre designation “novel” ceases to correspond to the nature of the developing concept, and Gogol now calls “Dead Souls” a poem. This plan is already oriented towards Dante’s “Divine Comedy” with its three-part structure: “hell”, “purgatory” and “paradise”. Accordingly, Gogol conceives the first volume of “Dead Souls” as the “hell” of modern Russian reality, which has gone astray from the straight path; the second volume outlines the exit from hell to its purification and revival (“purgatory”), and the third volume should show the triumph of bright, life-affirming began (“paradise”).

However, the assumption of a three-part structure of the concept of “Dead Souls” has recently been challenged by a number of researchers. After all, such a three-part structure does not correspond to Orthodox dogma and the Orthodox type of thinking. And in general, can a believing Christian talk about the establishment of “heavenly life” on this earth? Archimandrite Theodore (Bukharev), referring to the words of Gogol himself, argued that the poem should have ended with “Chichikov’s first breath for a true lasting life.” The rest will be reborn in the same way - “if they want.”

If earlier Gogol looked for the “fruitful grain” of Russian life in the historical past (“Taras Bulba”), now he wants to find it in the present. Gogol believes that the soul of a Russian Christian, having gone through terrible temptations and enticements, will return to the path of Orthodox truth. In the depths of his fall, at the very bottom of the abyss, a Christian will feel a righteous light igniting in his soul, the voice of conscience. One of the heroes of the unfinished second volume, addressing Chichikov, says:

“Hey, it’s not about this property, because of which people argue and cut each other, just as you can create prosperity in life here without thinking about another life. Believe me, Pavel Ivanovich, that until they give up everything for which they gnaw and eat each other on earth and think about the improvement of their spiritual property, the improvement of their earthly property will not be established. Times of hunger and poverty will come, both among all the people and separately in each... This, sir, is clear. Whatever you say, the body depends on the soul... Think not about dead souls, but about your living soul, and with God on a different path!”

In the same volume, the Governor-General, sensing the futility of fighting bribery with administrative measures, gathers all the officials of the provincial city and makes the following speech to them: “The fact is that it has come to us to save our land; that our land is perishing not from the invasion of twenty foreign languages, but from ourselves; that, bypassing the legal government, another government was formed, much stronger than any legal one. Their conditions were established; everything is assessed, and the prices are even made publicly known. And no ruler, even if he is wiser than all legislators and rulers, is able to correct evil, no matter how he restricts the actions of bad officials by appointing other officials as supervisors. Everything will be unsuccessful until each of us feels that just as in the era of the uprising the people armed themselves against their enemies, so they must rebel against untruth...”

The military governor’s speech to his subordinates here is reminiscent of Taras Bulba’s speech about “comradeship.” But if Gogol’s Zaporozhye hero called the people to unity and spiritual unity in the face of an external enemy, then the hero of the second volume of Dead Souls calls for general mobilization and militia against the internal enemy. It is in the spiritual perspective that opened up to Gogol that one can correctly understand the direction and pathos of the first volume of Dead Souls, which he completed in the summer of 1841.

The censorship, having recognized thirty-six passages as “doubtful”, also demanded a decisive reworking of “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” and a change in the title of the poem - instead of “Dead Souls”, “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls”. Gogol agreed to the revision, and on May 21, 1842, the first volume of the poem was published.

From the book Gogol in Russian criticism author

A few words about Gogol’s poem: “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls” Moscow. 1842. In the 8th sheet, 19 pages. We did not want to say anything about this strange brochure; but we were prompted to this by the following lines in it: We know that our words will seem strange to many; but we ask in them

From the book History of Russian Literature of the 19th Century. Part 2. 1840-1860 author Prokofieva Natalya Nikolaevna

Explanation for explanation about Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” Of the many articles written recently about “Dead Souls” or about “Dead Souls,” four are especially remarkable. They cannot help but be divided into two halves, in pairs. Each of two articles in a pair

From the book History of Russian Literature of the 19th Century. Part 1. 1800-1830s author Lebedev Yuri Vladimirovich

Dead Souls End of the poem. N.V. Gogol “The Adventures of Chichikov” Vashchenko-Zakharchenko. Kyiv. 1857What kind of fake is this that appears so brazenly? What kind of Mr. Vashchenko-Zakharchenko is this, who so boldly borrows the title of a book and the name of Gogol for his product in order to provide sales to his

From the book Fire of the Worlds. Selected articles from the magazine "Vozrozhdenie" author Ilyin Vladimir Nikolaevich

Poem “Dead Souls” (1835–1852). The idea and sources of the plot of the poem It is believed that, just like the plot of “The Inspector General,” the plot of “Dead Souls” was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. There are two known stories associated with the name of Pushkin and comparable to the plot of “Dead Souls”. During his stay in

From the book Russian Literature in Assessments, Judgments, Disputes: A Reader of Literary Critical Texts author Esin Andrey Borisovich

Genre originality of the poem “Dead Souls” In terms of genre, “Dead Souls” was conceived as a “high road” novel. Thus, in a certain sense, they correlated with the famous novel by Cervantes “Don Quixote”, which Pushkin also pointed out to Gogol in his time

From the book From Pushkin to Chekhov. Russian literature in questions and answers author Vyazemsky Yuri Pavlovich

The second volume of "Dead Souls". Creative drama of Gogol. Only a few fragments have survived from the second volume, testifying to the significant creative evolution of the writer. He dreamed of creating a positive hero who “would be able to say the almighty word: ‘Forward!’” Big

From the book Roll Call Kamen [Philological Studies] author Ranchin Andrey Mikhailovich

Gogol’s “Dead Souls” and the Problem of Sin The main theme of Gogol is Satan, sin, the Last Judgment, that is, demonology and amartology (the doctrine of sin). Amartology, as can be seen from the entirety of the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament and from pathological writing,

From the book Articles on Russian Literature [anthology] author Dobrolyubov Nikolay Alexandrovich author Sitnikov Vitaly Pavlovich

What and why do the landowners eat in the poem by N.V. Gogol's "Dead Souls" The gastronomic tastes and inclinations of Gogol's landowners from "Dead Souls" are an important characteristic, a means of revealing characters, one of the methods of author's assessment and a symbolization tool

From the author's book

A few words about Gogol’s poem: “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls” We do not at all take upon ourselves the important work of giving an account of this new great work of Gogol, who has already become highly respected by previous creations; we consider it necessary to say a few words to indicate

From the author's book

Dead souls Oh, you, my Rus'! My wild, riotous, wonderful, kiss, God love you, holy land... I tremble and feel with tears in my eyes, I hear broad strength and manner when I look at these steppes that have lost their end. Gogol Peering into the continent of Russian prose, already hidden from us

From the author's book

From the author's book

“Laughter through tears” in N.V. Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” I. “Dead Souls” is “a medical history written by a masterful hand” (A.I. Herzen). II. “Dead Souls” is a brilliant satire on bureaucratic-serf Russia.1. Depict “everything bad that exists in Russia...”2. Who are they -

From the author's book

Krupchanov L. M. N. V. Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” Gogol’s “Dead Souls” is a creation so deep in content and great in creative concept and artistic perfection of form that it alone would fill the lack of books for ten years and would appear alone

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol began his painstaking and conscientious work on the poem “Dead Souls” in 1835. The writer dreamed of creating some kind of majestic and comprehensive work about Russia. He wanted to show Russia from different sides, he wanted to explain the characters and images of Russian people.

The idea for creating the poem “Dead Souls” was given to Nikolai Vasilyevich by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. He told the author of the poem about a certain official who traveled around Russia and bought “dead souls.” This idea impressed Gogol so much that he immediately began writing.

When Nikolai Vasilyevich decided to read the first chapters to Alexander Sergeevich, he thought that his friend would start laughing at them. Because the author of the poem at that time thought that the novel was very funny. But after reading the first chapters of Pushkin, Gogol saw a different reaction. Alexander Sergeevich was sad and thoughtful. At that time, the poem seemed very sad to Pushkin.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol changed, corrected, and along the way made adjustments to his novel many times in order to achieve the desired result. After Pushkin's death, Gogol continued to write the poem in memory of his friend.

It took the poem six long years to reach the reader. When “Dead Souls” was written and sent to print, the censorship did not allow the work to pass. To do this, the author had to place all the blame on Chichikov himself. Although the initial version of the blame was attributed to officials.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol wanted to write a poem that would show all of Russia. I would tell you about the character, life and will of the Russian people. He almost succeeded. The author wanted to write three volumes of Dead Souls. In the first volume, he showed the very people whom he considered “dead souls.” The second volume would be a purgatory for these very souls and the third would be a rebirth. But, due to the illness of the author himself, the second volume was burned. Subsequently, he explained his action by saying that he could not find a way to revive the ideal.

In 1841, the novel “Dead Souls” was published. It is being sold out of bookstore shelves at the speed of light. The people are divided into two parts: the first is on the author’s side, the second is those same landowners and officials. The second half of the people desecrated Gogol and were extremely indignant and humiliated by what the author wrote in his poem. However, it is worth noting that the poem “Dead Souls” not only showed “dead souls”, but also showed Russia from different sides. She talked about people of different backgrounds and different characters.

Picture or drawing Dead Souls history of creation

Other retellings for the reader's diary

• Summary of the fairy tale The Gingerbread House by Charles Perrault

  Little children from a poor family got lost in the forest. There they saw a gingerbread house. It contained various treats and sweets

• Summary of the Tale of the Sea King and Vasilisa the Wise

  In a distant kingdom there lived a king and his wife. However, the couple was childless. One day the sovereign went on various trips to travel, and after a while it was time for him to return. And at this time his son was suddenly born,

• Brief summary of Shukshin Viburnum red

  Egor Prokudin leaves the zone. His dream is to start his own farm. He must meet his future wife. Egor and Lyubov Fedorovna know each other only by correspondence.

• Summary Aleksin My brother plays the clarinet

  The diary, of course, conveys Zhenya’s childish spontaneity. She herself cannot impress others with anything, and she does not try. She gets straight C grades, because for the Sister of a great musician, grades are nonsense. Why try? After all, she has a brilliant brother

• Summary of Yakovlev Bavaklava

  Twelve-year-old Lenya Sharov returns from school. He is surprised that he is not, as usual, greeted by his grandmother, who takes care of him while his parents are at work. The father tells the boy that his grandmother has died.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in the town of Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district, Poltava province. His childhood was spent on the family estate of Vasilyevka. My father, a passionate theater fan, wrote poems and plays, then presented them on the amateur stage with the Troshchinskys’ wealthy relatives.

Gogol himself, while studying at the gymnasium (city of Nizhyn), was also interested in theater and participated in productions. Young Gogol even played the role of Mrs. Prostakova in Fonvizin’s “The Minor”; as witnesses said, the spectators laughed until they colicked.

In “The Author's Confession” he described his first experiments in literary creativity. “My first experiments, my first exercises in compositions, which I acquired the skill for during my recent stay at school, were almost all of a lyrical and serious nature. Neither I myself nor my companions, who also practiced writing with me, thought that I would have to be a comic and satirical writer...”

Already in those years, Gogol knew how to accept criticism: when “The Tverdoslavich Brothers, a Slavic Tale” was considered unsuccessful by his friends, he “did not resist or object. He quite calmly tore his manuscript into small pieces and threw it into the heated oven,” as his classmate wrote. This was the first known burning of his works by Gogol.

His classmates did not notice his talent, and a funny memory of one of them remained: “N. V. Gogol passionately loved drawing and literature, but it would be too funny to think that Gogol would be Gogol.”

Poor health and lack of funds did not prevent Nikolai Vasilyevich from deciding to go to St. Petersburg in search of his destiny (1828).

This is how the modern Swedish writer Kjell Johansson presents his thoughts and feelings in his story “Gogol’s Face”: “I’m only nineteen! I was only nineteen years old when I first breathed the winter air of St. Petersburg. And as a result I got a severe runny nose.

With a high fever and a frostbitten nose, I lay in bed in the apartment we rented from we rented with Danilevsky...

In the end, I stood up, staggered, crawled out into the street and began to wander. Where am I?

I'm standing at Pushkin's house! It must be warm and cozy there inside. Pushkin is sitting there... I'm calling. The footman who opened the door looks me up and down.

Pushkin,” I finally squeeze out, “I need to see Pushkin.” This meeting did not take place. But she was there. Very little time passed, and he met Zhukovsky (in 1830), Pushkin (in 1831) ... They meet, and this is what Pushkin wrote about his young friend: “Our readers, of course, remember the impression made on us by the appearance of “ Evenings on the farm": everyone was delighted with this lively description of the singing and dancing tribe, these fresh pictures of Little Russian nature, this gaiety, simple-minded and at the same time crafty. How amazed we were at the Russian book, which made us laugh, we, who had not laughed since the times. Fonvizina!

And here’s how Pushkin’s conversation with Gogol appears to a modern writer: “Nikolai, I gave you the plot of The Inspector General, here’s another one for you. One rogue travels around Russia and, in order to get rich, buys up dead souls, serfs who have died but have not yet been included in the revision tale. Do you understand? Good idea, huh? Here you can depict all of Russia, whatever you want!

You gave me so much, Alexander Sergeevich!.. Today you gave me “Dead Souls”... You say that you yourself

It is impossible to tell this story while there is censorship. Why do you think that I can do this?”

Gogol begins his main work. He writes it in Italy, but is constantly connected with his homeland. The news comes from there. Here is an article by V. G. Belinsky in the Telescope magazine, which says that Gogol said a new word about literature. How everything in his stories is “simple, ordinary, natural and true and, at the same time, how original and new!” Gogol is happy But a few hours after reading the article, terrible news comes: Pushkin died...

So, Pushkin passed away. “My loss,” Gogol wrote, “is greater than anyone else’s. I didn’t undertake anything, I didn’t write anything without his advice... The great one was gone.”

Meanwhile, work on “Dead Souls” was underway. Of course, it was not a complete holiday. As in life, difficulties, failures, and disappointments are inevitable in artistic creativity. “To achieve success, you must experience failure. ...But if you are strong enough, you can easily withstand all failures, moreover, you enjoy them, this continuous fiasco in front of yourself. The one who walks will master the road!

I was going to create something that no one had created before. “Dead Souls” will become the great work that Pushkin bequeathed to me to write.

Like Dante's "Divine Comedy", it will consist of three parts: "Hell", "Purgatory" and "Paradise". Already the first part will highlight the whole of Russia, expose all the evil. I knew the book would cause outrage and protests. Such is my fate - to be at war with my compatriots. But when the second part comes out, the protests will fall silent, and with the completion of the third part, I will be recognized as a spiritual leader. For here the secret intention of this work will be revealed. Works about people without souls and the death of human souls. Works about the art of poetry. And the idea is this: the path of people to salvation. To life! Risen! Risen!

After three years of living abroad (Germany, Switzerland, France (Paris), Italy (Naples, Rome), he came to Moscow and read to his friends the first six chapters of the first volume of Dead Souls. Gogol called his mother to Moscow and settled his financial affairs. .. In September 1839, he was again in Rome and wrote from there to S. T. Aksakov: “My work is great, my feat is saving. I have now died for everything petty...” And already in his condition there are signs of an illness that darkened the end his life.

In May 1842, Dead Souls came out of print. The success of the book was extraordinary. Gogol goes abroad again, tries to get treatment, spends the winter in warmer climes. Six nomadic years are spent abroad.

In 1845, he burned the written chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls, and in 1846 he prepared the book Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends.

In the “Author's Confession” Gogol states: “... it’s not my business to teach with a sermon...”, but this is exactly what we see on the pages of “Selected Passages”, which for many years were not published in our country, and now that they have been published without reductions and exceptions, again gave rise to the most irreconcilable disputes.

After a trip to holy places in Palestine, Gogol returned to Russia in 1848. He visited the house in Vasilievka twice, and one winter he escaped from the cold in Odessa. I wrote a lot, suffered from lack of money, got sick, received treatment...

The second volume of Dead Souls was born slowly. On the night of February 12, 1852, the author burned all the newly written chapters of his great poem.

After the destruction of his creations, Gogol became greatly weakened.

He never left his room anymore; he didn’t want to see anyone. I almost stopped eating, only occasionally drinking a sip or two of water. All day long he sat motionless in his chair, staring blankly at one point.