As a satire on Russian bureaucracy the play has no rival: nearly every character is dishonest, and it is a delight to see them all taken in by the empty-headed hero with his fluent lying. Of all plays which can count on drawing big houses at holiday-time in Russia this stands easily first. It became a classic as soon as it was produced and it is as irresistible in its appeal now as it was when it was written.
Gogol now left Russia and settled in Rome, never to return to his native country.
It was here that he produced his masterpiece, Dead Souls, the great comic work of all Russia. Again it was Pushkin who gave him the idea. The hero of the book, Chichikov, conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord possessed so many serfs, called "souls." Every ten years a revision took place and the landlord had to pay poll-tax on all the "souls" who had died in that period. Between the periods no one inspected the lists. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls from the landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to get out of the tax by this means; Chichikov would then register his purchases and then mortgage the souls at the rate of three hundred roubles each at a bank in Petrograd or Moscow, representing that they were in some corner of the Crimea, and so make enough money to buy live "souls" of his own.
The book is simply the odyssey of Chichikov all over Russia in his search for these souls: it gives infinite scope to the author, for he can bring in every type of man and woman that he knows. The book was to be divided into three parts, the first of which appeared in 1842: he went on working at the other two parts until 1852, when he died. He twice threw the second part of his work into the fire when it was finished, so we are left with a complete first part and an incomplete second. The third part was probably only sketched. In the second part he meant to show us the moral regeneration of Chichikov: apparently he could not bring himself to believe that he had done this adequately, and he came to be more and more of an ascetic and a recluse as the years passed.
So here once more we get that extraordinary "break" in mid-flight which is so peculiar a characteristic of all Russian writers.
The book made an immediate and lasting impression upon the country. It pleased some by its reality, its artistry and its social ideas; it pleased the Slavophils by its truth to life and its smell of Russia. When Gogol read the first chapter to his master, Pushkin, the latter remarked: "God! what a sad country Russia is!"—a queer comment, you may think, for the most humorous book that Russia has produced. But the truth is that, comic as the best chapters are, Gogol refuses to flatter either his country or the people who inhabit it, and in Chichikov, just as in Oblòmov, most readers find themselves wondering whether after all there is not a good deal of the character there portrayed in themselves, some such scoundrelly ideas, at any rate in embryo. But Chichikov is so shameless, so entertaining, so magnificent a liar, so plausible, so ingenious, in a word, so Falstaffian that he enchants us all. He is always human and the least of a hypocrite imaginable.
In fact Gogol goes further than most satirists in other countries and having laid bare his baseness, turns round and tells us that we have no cause to be angry with him: Chichikov is, after all, only the victim of circumstances, of the ruling passion of gain: like all his countrymen, he is indulgent and charitable: he cannot be brought to condemn. He sees the mean and the common, but he does not conclude from that that life is either of these. Rather does he infer the opposite. Chichikov is great just as Napoleon was great, the victim of a ruling passion and great by reason of it. Our minds immediately turn to Dostoievsky once more, to Crime and Punishment, where the chief character tries to be the victim of a ruling passion, not this time of rascality, but fails.
Dead Souls is not unlike Don Quixote. It has the same depth: it makes boys laugh, young men think and old men weep.