Despite Gogol's undoubted claim to be regarded as the founder of Russian fiction, it is worth remembering that of the three works on which rests his international fame, two cannot possibly be called germinal. The drama Revizor is the best comedy in the Russian language; but, partly for that very reason, it produced no school. The romance Taras Bulba has no successful follower in Russian literature, and brought forth no fruit anywhere for fifty years, until the appearance of the powerful fiction-chronicles by Sienkiewicz. It has all the fiery ardour of a young genius; its very exaggeration, its delight in bloody battle, show a certain immaturity; it breathes indeed the spirit of youth. With the exception of The Cloak, Gogol had by 1840 written little to indicate the direction that the best part of Russian literature was to take. It was not until the publication of Dead Souls that Russia had a genuine realistic novel. This book is broad enough in scope and content to serve as the foundation of Russian fiction, and to sustain the wonderful work of Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Dostoevski. All the subsequent great novels in Russia point back to Dead Souls.
No two books could possibly show a greater contrast than Taras Bulba and Dead Souls. One reveals an extraordinary power of condensation: the other an infinite expansion. One deals with heroes and mighty exploits; the other with positively commonplace individuals and the most trivial events. One is the revival of the glorious past; the other a reflection of the sordid present. One is painted with the most brilliant hues of Romanticism, and glows with the essence of the Romantic spirit--Aspiration; the other looks at life through an achromatic lens, and is a catalogue of Realities. To a certain extent, the difference is the difference between the bubbling energy of youth and the steady energy of middle age. For, although Gogol was still young in years when he composed Dead Souls, the decade that separated the two works was for the author a constant progress in disillusion. In the sixth chapter of the latter book, Gogol has himself revealed the sad transformation that had taken place in his own mind, and that made his genius express itself in so different a manner:--
"Once, long ago, in the years of my youth, in those beautiful years that rolled so swiftly, I was full of joy, charmed when I arrived for the first time in an unknown place; it might be a farm, a poor little district town, a large village, a small settlement: my eager, childish eyes always found there many interesting objects. Every building, everything that showed an individual touch, enchanted my mind, and left a vivid impression. . . . To-day I travel through all the obscure villages with profound indifference, and I gaze coldly at their sad and wretched appearance: my eyes linger over no object, nothing grotesque makes me smile: that which formerly made me burst out in a roar of spontaneous laughter, and filled my soul with cheerful animation, now passes before my eyes as though I saw it not, and my mouth, cold and rigid, finds no longer a word to say at the very spectacle which formerly possessed the secret of filling my heart with ecstasy. O my youth! O my fine simplicity!"
Gogol spent the last fifteen years of his life writing this book, and he left it unfinished. Pushkin gave him the subject, as he had for Revizor. One day, when the two men were alone together, Pushkin told him, merely as a brief anecdote, of an unscrupulous promoter, who went about buying up the names of dead serfs, thus enabling their owners to escape payment of the taxes which were still in force after the last registration. The names were made over to the new owner, with all legal formalities, so that he apparently possessed a large fortune, measured in slaves; these names the promoter transferred to a remote district, with the intention of obtaining a big cash loan from some bank, giving his fictitious property as security; but he was quickly caught, and his audacious scheme came to nothing. The story stuck in Gogol's mind, and he conceived the idea of a vast novel, in which the travels of the collector of dead souls should serve as a panorama of the Russian people. Both Gogol and Pushkin thought of ÊDon Quixote, the spirit of which is evident enough in this book. Not long after their interview, Gogol wrote to Pushkin: "I have begun to write Dead Souls. The subject expands into a very long novel, and I think it will be amusing, but now I am only at the third chapter. . . . I wish to show, at least from one point of view, all Russia." Gogol declared that he did not write a single line of these early chapters without thinking how Pushkin would judge it, at what he would laugh, at what he would applaud., When he read aloud from the manuscript, Pushkin, who had listened with growing seriousness, cried, "God! what a sad country is Russia!" and later be added, "Gogol invents nothing; it is the simple truth, the terrible truth."
The first part of his work, containing the first eleven chapters, or "songs," was published in May 1842. For the rest of his life, largely spent abroad, Gogol worked fitfully at the continuation of his masterpiece. Ill health, nervous depression, and morbid asceticism preyed upon his mind; in 1845 he burned all that he had written of the second volume. But he soon began to rewrite it, though he made slow and painful progress, having too much of improductivé slave either to complete it or to be satisfied with it. At Moscow, a short time before his death, in a night of wakeful misery, he burned a whole mass of his manuscripts. Among them was unfortunately the larger portion of the rewritten second part of Dead Souls. Various reasons have been assigned as the cause of the destruction of his book--some have said, it was religious remorse for having written the novel at all; others, rage at adverse criticism; others, his own despair at not having reached ideal perfection. But it seems probable that its burning was simply a mistake. Looking among his papers, a short time after the conflagration, he cried out, "My God! what have I done! that isn't what I meant to burn!" But whatever the reason, the precious manuscript was forever lost; and the second part of the work remains sadly incomplete, partly written up from rough notes left by the author, Partly supplied by another hand.
Dead Souls is surely a masterpiece, but a masterpiece of life rather than of art. Even apart from its unfinished shape, it is characterised by that formlessness so distinctive of the great Russian novelists the sole exception being Turgenev. The story is so full of disgressions, of remarks in mock apology addressed to the reader, of comparisons of the Russian people with other nations, of general disquisitions on realism, of glowing soliloquies in various moods, that the whole thing is a kind of colossal note-book. Gogol poured into it all his observations, reflections, and comments on life. It is not only a picture of Russia, it is a spiritual autobiography. It is without form, but not void. Gogol called his work a poem; and he could not have found a less happy name. Despite lyrical interludes, it is as far removed from the nature and form of Poetry as it is from Drama. It is a succession of pictures of life, given with the utmost detail, having no connection with each other, and absolutely no crescendo, no movement, no approach to a climax. The only thread that holds the work together is the person of the travelling promoter, Chichikov, whose visits to various communities give the author the opportunity he desired. After one has grasped the plan of the book, the purpose of Chichikov's mission, which one can do in two minutes, one may read the chapters in any haphazard order. Fortunately they are all interesting in their photographic reality.
The whole thing is conceived in the spirit of humour, and its author must be ranked among the great humorists of all time. There is an absurdity about the mission of the chief character, which gives rise to all sorts of ludicrous situations. It takes time for each serf-owner to comprehend Chichikov's object, and he is naturally regarded with suspicion. In one community it is whispered that he is Napoleon, escaped from St. Helena, and travelling in disguise. An old woman with whom he deals has an avaricious cunning worthy of a Norman peasant. The dialogue between the two is a masterly commentary on the root of all evil. But although all Russia is reflected in a comic mirror, which by its very distortion emphasises the defects of each character, Gogol was not primarily trying to write a funny book. The various scenes at dinner parties and at the country inns are laughable; but Gogol's laughter, like that of most great humorists, is a compound of irony, satire, pathos, tenderness, and moral indignation. The general wretchedness of the serfs, the indifference of their owners to their condition, the pettiness and utter meanness of village gossip, the ridiculous affectations of small-town society, the universal ignorance, stupidity, and dulness--all these are remorselessly revealed in the various bargains made by the hero. And what a hero! A man neither utterly bad nor very good; shrewd rather than intelligent; limited in every way. He is a Russian, but a universal type. No one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs: indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller, whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and the persuasive power of his tongue. Chichikov is all things to all men.
Not content with the constant interpolation of side remarks and comments, queries of a politely ironical nature to the reader, in the regular approved fashion of English novels, Gogol added after the tenth chapter a defiant epilogue, in which he explained his reasons for dealing with fact rather than with fancy, of ordinary people rather than with heroes, of commonplace events rather than with melodrama; and then suddenly he tried to jar the reader out of his self-satisfaction, like Balzac in Pére Goriot.
"Pleased with yourselves more than ever, you will smile slowly, and then say with grave deliberation: 'It is true that in some of our provinces one meets very strange people, people absolutely ridiculous, and sometimes scoundrels too!'
"Ah, but who among you, serious readers, I address myself to those who have the humility of the true Christian, who among you, being alone, in the silence of the evening, at the time when one communes with oneself, will look into the depths of his soul to ask in all sincerity this question? 'Might there not be in me something of Chichikov?'"