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nothing; it is the simple truth, the terrible truth."

The work on one hand was received as nothing less than an exposure of
all Russia--what would foreigners think of it? The liberal elements,
however, the critical Belinsky among them, welcomed it as a
revelation, as an omen of a freer future. Gogol, who had meant to do a
service to Russia and not to heap ridicule upon her, took the
criticisms of the Slavophiles to heart; and he palliated his critics
by promising to bring about in the succeeding parts of his novel the
redemption of Chichikov and the other "knaves and blockheads." But the
"Westerner" Belinsky and others of the liberal camp were mistrustful.
It was about this time (1847) that Gogol published his Correspondence
with Friends, and aroused a literary controversy that is alive to
this day. Tolstoi is to be found among his apologists.

Opinions as to the actual significance of Gogol's masterpiece differ.
Some consider the author a realist who has drawn with meticulous
detail a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him
a great symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe
the living of Russia as well as its dead. Chichikov himself is now
generally regarded as a universal character. We find an American
professor, William Lyon Phelps[1], of Yale, holding the opinion that
"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 of the persuasive power of
his tongue." This is also the opinion held by Prince Kropotkin[2], who
says: "Chichikov may buy dead souls, or railway shares, or he may
collect funds for some charitable institution, or look for a position
in a bank, but he is an immortal international type; we meet him
everywhere; he is of all lands and of all times; he but takes
different forms to suit the requirements of nationality and time."

[1] Essays on Russian Novelists. Macmillan.

[2] Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature. Duckworth and Co.

Again, the work bears an interesting relation to Gogol himself. A
romantic, writing of realities, he was appalled at the commonplaces of
life, at finding no outlet for his love of colour derived from his
Cossack ancestry. He realised that he had drawn a host of "heroes,"
"one more commonplace than another, that there was not a single
palliating circumstance, that there was not a single place where the
reader might find pause to rest and to console himself, and that when
he had finished the book it was as though he had walked out of an
oppressive cellar into the open air." He felt perhaps inward need to
redeem Chichikov; in Merejkovsky's opinion he really wanted to save
his own soul, but had succeeded only in losing it. His last years were
spent morbidly; he suffered torments and ran from place to place like

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