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later, back into life, he repented of all he had written, and in the
frenzy of a wakeful night burned all his manuscripts, including the
second part of Dead Souls, only fragments of which were saved. There
was yet a third part to be written. Indeed, the second part had been
written and burned twice. Accounts differ as to why he had burned it
finally. Religious remorse, fury at adverse criticism, and despair at
not reaching ideal perfection are among the reasons given. Again it is
said that he had destroyed the manuscript with the others
inadvertently.

The poet Pushkin, who said of Gogol that "behind his laughter you feel
the unseen tears," was his chief friend and inspirer. It was he who
suggested the plot of Dead Souls as well as the plot of the earlier
work The Revisor, which is almost the only comedy in Russian. The
importance of both is their introduction of the social element in
Russian literature, as Prince Kropotkin points out. Both hold up the
mirror to Russian officialdom and the effects it has produced on the
national character. The plot of Dead Souls is simple enough, and is
said to have been suggested by an actual episode.

It was the day of serfdom in Russia, and a man's standing was often
judged by the numbers of "souls" he possessed. There was a periodical
census of serfs, say once every ten or twenty years. This being the
case, an owner had to pay a tax on every "soul" registered at the last
census, though some of the serfs might have died in the meantime.
Nevertheless, the system had its material advantages, inasmuch as an
owner might borrow money from a bank on the "dead souls" no less than
on the living ones. The plan of Chichikov, Gogol's hero-villain, was
therefore to make a journey through Russia and buy up the "dead
souls," at reduced rates of course, saving their owners the government
tax, and acquiring for himself a list of fictitious serfs, which he
meant to mortgage to a bank for a considerable sum. With this money he
would buy an estate and some real life serfs, and make the beginning
of a fortune.

Obviously, this plot, which is really no plot at all but merely a ruse
to enable Chichikov to go across Russia in a troika, with Selifan
the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a
magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian
panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough
but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at
the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the
midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it
into his art, on the stage say, we shall roll about with laughter and
only wonder we did not notice it before." But the comic in Dead
Souls is merely external. Let us see how Pushkin, who loved to laugh,
regarded the work. As Gogol read it aloud to him from the manuscript
the poet grew more and more gloomy and at last cried out: "God! What a
sad country Russia is!" And later he said of it: "Gogol invents

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