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DEAD SOULS
BY
NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH GOGOL
Translated By
D. J. Hogarth
Introduction By
John Cournos
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, born at Sorochintsky,
Russia, on 31st March 1809. Obtained government
post at St. Petersburg and later an appointment
at the university. Lived in Rome from 1836 to
1848. Died on 21st February 1852.
PREPARER'S NOTE
The book this was typed from contains a complete Part I, and a
partial Part II, as it seems only part of Part II survived the
adventures described in the introduction. Where the text notes
that pages are missing from the "original", this refers to the
Russian original, not the translation.
All the foreign words were italicised in the original, a style
not preserved here. Accents and diphthongs have also been left
out.
INTRODUCTION
Dead Souls, first published in 1842, is the great prose classic of
Russia. That amazing institution, "the Russian novel," not only began
its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil'evich
Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come
since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree.
Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier
work by the same author, a short story entitled The Cloak; this idea
has been wittily expressed by another compatriot, who says: "We have
all issued out of Gogol's Cloak."
Dead Souls, which bears the word "Poem" upon the title page of the
original, has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the
Pickwick Papers, while E. M. Vogue places its author somewhere
between Cervantes and Le Sage. However considerable the influences of
Cervantes and Dickens may have been--the first in the matter of
structure, the other in background, humour, and detail of
characterisation--the predominating and distinguishing quality of the
work is undeniably something foreign to both and quite peculiar to
itself; something which, for want of a better term, might be called
the quality of the Russian soul. The English reader familiar with the
works of Dostoieffsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoi, need hardly be told what
this implies; it might be defined in the words of the French critic
just named as "a tendency to pity." One might indeed go further and
say that it implies a certain tolerance of one's characters even
though they be, in the conventional sense, knaves, products, as the
case might be, of conditions or circumstance, which after all is the
thing to be criticised and not the man. But pity and tolerance are
rare in satire, even in clash with it, producing in the result a deep
sense of tragic humour. It is this that makes of Dead Souls a unique
work, peculiarly Gogolian, peculiarly Russian, and distinct from its
author's Spanish and English masters.
Still more profound are the contradictions to be seen in the author's
personal character; and unfortunately they prevented him from
completing his work. The trouble is that he made his art out of life,
and when in his final years he carried his struggle, as Tolstoi did
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