Dead Souls: A Novel | Nikolai Gogol | Dead Souls: Translation is Everything

Dead Souls: A Novel | Nikolai Gogol | A Charming Russian Masterpiece

books:

Dead Souls: A Novel

	Dead Souls: A Novel Nikolai Gogol Vintage, 1997 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.

for more information click here

Dead Souls: Translation is Everything

Perhaps no other novel requires a more exacting translation than Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls." This translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky isn't bad, but it gives the book the Pevear/Volokhonsky treatment ... read their translations of The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina and Dead Souls back to back and you'd think they were written by the same novelist (well, if you're from Mars and had never heard of the books beforehand, that is.)

But as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his lectures of "Dead Souls", the greatest of all translations was by Bernard Gilbert Guerney. This version of Dead Souls was recently revised by Susanne Fusso for Yale University Press and I recommend it highly.

So why does translation matter? Because as Nabokov points out in Lectures on Russian Literature, "Dead Souls" is more poem than novel. The plot to "Dead Souls" is almost entirely beside the point ... it all pretty much goes in a circle (by the way, The Wire - The Complete Third Season" was modeled on this style.) Where this novel shines is in its haunting and evocative language. Nabokov points out several mind-blowing techniques that Gogol employs ... one is to take an object, create a metaphor about that object to explain it's importance, introduce another object in that metaphor, then compare the second object to a person ... this being a new character, introduced via a highly elegant segue.

The Pevear/Volokhonsky version picks up most of this, but there are some dreadful "Dead Souls" adaptations out there (especially thisDead Souls version that truncates the action and misses the poetry altogether. Especially awful is this Dead Souls audiobook that Amazon.com correctly calls abridged, but both Audible.com and iTunes label unabridged.

"Dead Souls" is a deceptively dense book. I recommend reading it along with Nabokov's lectures to get the full effect. Also, don't be deceived into reading the so-called sequel ... Gogol wished these disjointed new tales to be burned at his death and most critics agree, for good reason.

for more information click here

A Charming Russian Masterpiece

I bought a copy of the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide. In that guide the editors selected 45 works of fiction as masterpieces from 375 well known writers of fiction - all written since since Cervantes. In that guide they describe why those 45 books are "masterpieces." Dead Souls is one of the 45 masterpieces, so I bought and read the book along with many others of those 45.

Dead Souls is not a novel but was called "an epic poem" by Gogol, similar to Tolstoy's characterization of War and Peace as not a novel but an "epic in prose." Hence, Dead Souls was not written as a balanced novel and as many critics have pointed out the actual plot is not terribly important. It was written as the first part of a three part trilogy on Russian life, and it was published as "The Adventures of Chichikov." The charm is found not in the overall plot, but it is found in the detailed descriptions of what happens day to day throughout the story.

From what we know, Pushkin suggested the story to Gogol based on the concept that serfs were considered to be the property of the landowner and there might be value in owning the title to dead serfs or "dead souls." Also, the characterization of being a "dead soul" has a second interpretation: it is to imply a moral and spiritual inferiority. So, the theme extends beyond the commercial transactions of buying up "dead souls" from various farm owners.

As a general reader, I was captured by the humour and charm of the daily life of the protagonist, Chichikov, as he travels by horse drawn carriage going from town to town in rural Russia, staying in small hotels or with farmers or rural gentry. In his travels he mixes with the locals in each town and he tries to ingratiate himself with the local officials as part of the process of building trust to find and buy dead souls; that is, he meets land owners and buys the title to those serfs who have recently died. Gogol treats us to a broad picture of daily life in rural Russia including many small details. It is so detailed that we can almost taste the food, smell the smells, and perhaps some will want to buy a horse?

In this work Gogol sets the literary tone for many Russian writers who follow in the 19th century including Dosoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Dostoevsky, was in fact hailed as the new Gogol in the 1840s when he emerged from obscurity and became famous. There are many shorter works by these three authors where one could almost substitute Gogol for the author and one would be hard pressed to make the differentiation, and I reference Dostoevsky's "Poor Folk" as an example of a very "Gogol like" work.

This is a wondeful book that will disappoint few. Since reading this I have read many other Russian works and still think this is one of the better and more charming books of the era. If you like this but want something a bit different, I recommend Chekhov's one and only novel, The Shooting Party.

for more information click here

Russian satire at its best.

Gogol is rightly esteemed as the greatest satirist in classical Russian literature, and is certainly a personal favorite among the 19th century authors. "Dead Souls" is, in my humble opinion, his hands-down masterpiece. It doesn't offer the same sitcom-ish humor of "The Government Inspector," which was cutting-edge stuff in its time. Instead, it is riddled from beginning to end with more subtle, but still delightfully amusing vignettes as the enterprising Chichikov goes about his rather unconventional business of building his "estate" by buying up low-priced (i.e. dead) serfs.

I won't elaborate on the storyline, since that has already been done more than adequately in other reviews. It is enough to say that Gogol's brand of humor is both witty and insightful, and caused quite a stir among the intelligentsia of his day. Many, such as Belinski, viewed it as an attack on the corruption and ineptitude of the "establishment," i.e. the westernizing tsarist regime. There is certainly an element of that. Others saw it differently, including Gogol himself, if his later writings are rightly interpreted. "Dead Souls" is much more of a commentary on the loss of the Russian soul. It is about the corruption of traditions and cultural distinctives that defined what it meant to be Russian.

Decide for yourself which direction Gogol was coming from. It certainly helps to have some familiarity with the history and culture of the time, but Gogol's commentary is near enough to the surface that those things are not essential to appreciate his work. Either way, don't take it too seriously. Just get a good laugh out of it. I did.

for more information click here

An Incredibly Funny Social Satire

Older Russian literature, for the most part, has an odd way of alienating modern readers, likely because the prose tends to be dense, the plots thin. But what some of the most popular Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol do better than maybe any other literary tradition is capture the mindsets and what drives a person to do what they do. "Dead Souls" is a wonderful example of what a social satire should be - it takes the Russian landowner class and the Russian peasantry and interweaves an insightful critique with a humorous tale of a man who tries to buy up dead souls so as to make it appear he is a more wealthy landowner than he really is. Chichikov, the protagonist, moves from estate to estate, party to party, in such an attractive way that everyone he meets wants to learn more about this mysterious man. Beyond the social satire, Gogol has a way of including a number of maxims and sayings without destroying the fabric of the story. I highly recommend this book but with a warning - it's not the kind of book you can speed through. It needs to be read slowly and enjoyed.

for more information click here

definitely worth a read!

Gogol himself claimed that Pushkin had told him that up until his own life, Gogol was the most successful in depicting the 'poshlost' of Russian social life, and this book certainly shows him to be correct. Not only with reference to the dead souls (serfs) that Chichikov purchased for his own gain, but also as a social commentary on post-Napoleonic Russia via the characters Gogol has developed in this self-described poema makes this a very insightful and enjoyable read.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

products you might be interested in