Dead Souls

By: Nikolai Gogol, Constance Garnett - translator

Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton

Gogol's great Russian classic is the Pickwick Papers of Russian literature. It takes a sharp but humorous look at life in all its strata but especially the devious complexities in Russia, with its landowners and serfs. We are introduced to Chichikov, a businessman who, in order to trick the tax authorities, buys up dead 'souls', or serfs, whose names still appear on the government census. Despite being a dealer in phantom crimes and paper ghosts, he is the most beguiling of Gogol's characters. Gogol's obsession with attempting to display 'the untold riches of the Russian soul' eventually led him to madness, religious mania, and death. Dismissed by him as merely 'a pale introduction to the great epic poem which is taking shape in my mind', Dead Souls is the culmination of Gogol's genius. Translator: Constance Garnett.

Download the accompanying reference guide.Public Domain (P)2017 Naxos AudioBooks

Classics can be entertaining even with dead souls

I enjoyed the book which I find oddly amusing. I was a bit disappointed by the sermon at the end. I can empathize with the author indignation with a corrupt bureocracy but his stand against it, in my opinion, weights down the novel. Mercyfully the moral of the story is at the end and not too long so it is bearable.

funniest and most fun

loved it, every moment was so much pleasure, would highly recommend. Gogol has a perfect imagination

Marvelous

Gogol painted a marvelous picture of rural Russia, post the 1812 invasion. He has mastered satire and leaves the reader wanting

Well done, pacing problems between books I and II

Very well done. The pacing in the middle dragged a bit for me, Chichikov's backstory is great, but there's a lot of impromptu poetry and descriptions of nature that slow things down.

Nostriov is entertaining and Boulton's performance alone to put a big smile on my face.

Absolutely great!

An incredibly funny and endearing book. It is sad though that it will forever remain unfinished.

Hilarious and well done, but massive sections of the manuscript are missing?

The book is well performed by the reader, and the text itself is perfectly wonderful. I didn’t expect it to be so clever and comical. It’s fantastically funny.

Sometimes, audio books from Audible (elsewhere too?) contain glitches which seem to sometimes result in missing phrases/passages, or duplicated phrases/passages. The character of the glitches vary, but a glitch is a glitch. In this book, there are several instances when the reader says something like (paraphrasing) “an extension section of the manuscript is missing here.” It’s a difficulty of the audiobook format that we cannot easily know, I’m the moment, whether the author has written these words directly and means to imply somehow that he has been conveying a story whose true source is some unnamed 3rd person, which is how I took it, or whether there is some other problem with the book itself. And there’s a question as to how such problems might have arisen. Who knows! It’s not explained. At first, these missing sections, for me, added to the comedy, and added mystery and I wondered whether Gogol might later explain to us (he often speaks as the author directly to his audience) why the sections are missing. It seems, however, that sections of the actual manuscript are simply missing. After finishing the audio novel and researching my question online, I see that it’s common knowledge that the book simply ends mid-sentence. I haven’t seen, however, any explanation of the several other noted missing sections. There is one break in the story that is quite unsatisfying, unfortunately, a break after which our putative hero (or antihero) is suddenly apparently wealthy, and seemingly no longer traveling at all but is quite established. This is altogether confusing. Some greater warning, I think, is warranted.

Even so, this novel is truly excellent and excellently performed. I do not at all regret having bought it or listened and plan to listen again before long. A true joy and delight.

incredible writing, ok plot

The quality of descriptions and narration are unbeatable, but the plot itself seems lacking. the characters are interesting and the social commentary on 19th century, bribe culture in Russian politics is solid, though deterministic at times. however, the plot itself doesn't satisfy like the narration as the story just kind of ends. the characters are developed thorough, but not to a real point. great read, nonetheless.

When a culture looses its soul

“Dead Souls,” by Nikolai Gogol, published in 1842, is considered the first of the great Russian novels. Originally, Gogol meant for this to be the first of a trilogy, but got stuck on the second volume, rewriting it at least twice. In 1852, in Rome, he became more and more depressed and with some urging by a Father Matthew and others as well as a feeling of guilt for his sins, burned his remaining manuscripts in his stove and starved himself to death. Fortunately, some portions of the manuscript survived and were included in this book. 

In the book, a mysterious person, Chichikov, arrives in a small provincial town. Everyone is impressed by his manner and poise and assumes that he is a person of some rank. They invite him to their social gatherings and everyone wants to entertain him. However, he first has some business to take care of and begins to travel about the surrounding countryside with his coach driver visiting the land owners and presenting with a bizarre proposition. He wants to buy from them their serfs who have died (dead souls) since the last census, thus saving them from having to pay the tax on them every year until the next census, which could be many years in the future since the census was not done on any regular schedule. We are not told why Chichikov wants them but the benefit for the land owner is quite obvious. They get some money for serfs that have died and are no longer productive; they save money on taxes; what’s the downside?

Gogol uses this simple basic plot line to satirize the whole of the Russian upper class and the entire system. The land owners are more like caricatures and run the gamut of the various responses you might expect. There are those whose greed causes them to ask no questions and agree easily. There are others who are ready to sell but attempt to drive a hard bargain. 

The land owners are presented as comedic and simple caricatures, with much of the novel's humor derived from interactions with them. There are those who seem naive and think that Chichikov is a generous man who wants to help them. There are those who refuse more because they just don’t want to give anything up that someone else shows that they want. Then, when Chichikov returns to town to handle the bills of sale we see the corruption and duplicity of the town officials as well the hypocrisy and prejudice in the focus on social status. When it is discovered that the serfs that Chichikov is purchasing are dead, rumors spread and grow. What could he want with dead souls? Is all of this a ruse to distract them from his real goal? Maybe he is trying to make fools of them. Some spread a rumor that he wants to elope with the governor's daughter. When he finds out, he decides to leave town. 

And, we begin to learn more about his scheme. Chichikov realizes that, since serfs are property and landowners can use any property as collateral for a mortgage, if he can amass a sufficiently large number of serfs (that he can purchase for a pittance, since they are dead) on paper, he can get a mortgage and can become a landowner himself. He has purchased them. They are not listed in the census as dead. Just as we knew all along, Chichikov is a confidence man, a trickster. But the strange thing is, while the landowners, officials, and the upper class in general are caricatures, Chichikov is a character. He is charming, refined, and persuasive on the surface but conniving and narcissistic inside. And we eventually find more of his history and what drives him. And we may realize that the “dead souls” include much more than the serfs he is purchasing. It is pervasive in the upper class (and the living serfs that appear in the book are in the background, almost like furniture), including Chichikov. Gogol wants to show clearly how corrupt, fraudulent, and hypocritical Russian society has become. 

And yet, not without hope. As Chichikov is reading through the bills of sale with the list of names in order to write out the legal documents needed to process the transfer in town, he begins to imagine the people behind the names. He noted how some landowners had simply written down names and some even using initials for their given names. As he began to imagine them as men (he only wanted to purchase men) “who had worked, ploughed, got drunk, driven wagons, deceived their masters, or maybe had simply been good muzhiks (peasant), he was possessed by a strange feeling that he himself did not understand." And when he found that one landowner had even written, along with each name, his skills and duties, his imagination ran away. We see in Chichikov at that moment a soul that is not yet dead, with a hint of life. But, he then goes on with his plan. 

Book 2 is much shorter because it is a fragment. It seems that Gogol had, by then, determined to not just write a descriptive novel, but a novel that could change Russia. He worked on it for 10 years, destroying his manuscript twice and it became an obsession that drove him to finally kill himself. The fragments that remain show Chichikov going further and getting more desparate, but ends with him seemingly ready to turn away from his schemes, but we will never find out whether that was a fleeting promise or a true change of heart.  

It is an old book written in an old style and may bore modern readers looking for action and progression to a goal cleanly without extraneous details. And yet, those details help give a much greater understand of Russian life in the mid-1800s and even what it means today to be Russian. If you can read it in the context of the time you may enjoy it enough to wish that Gogol had let us know…the rest of the story.

Fabulous first 3/4

A delightful sense of the absurd most of the time. Toward the end, there are some places where pages are missing from the original manuscript, and he gets a little bit more listed. But the first 3/4 is an absolute delight.

Astute social commentary

Gogol keenly discerned the character types of many among the Russian landed gentry of his day. He presents them amusingly, with all their warts. He also seemed to have an idea how Russian society might develop in the future, though he didn't live to see it.