“Dead Souls” by Nikolai Gogol (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

I will try to read almost any book translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky. This novel does not always flow, especially in Volume 2, which is hindered by gaps, large and small, in Gogol’s manuscript. The result is a plot that sometimes leaves the reader guessing to fill in the blanks. One is saved by the fact that not too much happens in this story anyway. For the most part, Gogol weaves a beautiful description of provincial life in a Russian town. Of a typical landowner the narrator wonders, “Were you born such a bear, or did you get bearified by the backwoods life, sowing grain, dealing with muzhiks, and turning through all that into what’s known as a pinchfist? But no, I think you’d be just the same even if you’d been raised according to fashion, got your start and lived in Petersburg, and not in this backwoods. The whole difference is now you tuck away half a rack of lamb with groats, followed by a cheesecake as big as a plate, and then you’d eat some sort of cutlets with truffles. Yes, and now you have muzhiks under your rule: you get along with them and, of course, wouldn’t mistreat them, because they're yours and it would be worse for you.” The muzhiks are, of course, serfs bound to the land and their master for life. The “dead souls” in Gogol’s title refer to serfs deemed still alive for the tax purposes of the infrequent Russian censuses, though very much dead in point of fact. “What was this riddle, indeed, what was this riddle of the dead souls? There was no logic whatsoever in dead souls. Why buy dead souls? Where would such a fool be found? What worn-out money would one pay for them? To what end, to what business, could these dead souls be tacked?” Chichikov, the novel’s protagonist, is a mysterious man, who seems to have a gift for buttering up provincial officials of title and repute. “Obscure and modest was our hero’s origin. His parents were of the nobility, but whether ancient or honorary—God knows.” His life’s path did not seem easy, but it was hard to tell just whose fault that was exactly. “Now it might be concluded that after such storms, trials, vicissitudes of fate, and sorrows of life, he would retire with his remaining ten thousand to the peaceful backwoods of some provincial town and there wither away forever in a chintz dressing gown at the window of a low house, on Sundays sorting out a fight between muzhiks that started up outside his windows, or refreshing himself by going to the chicken coop and personally inspecting the chicken destined for the soup, thus passing his none-too-noisy but in its own way also not quite useless life. But it did not happen so.” One longtime landowner summed up provincial life the best, “For us fashion is no order, and Petersburg is no church.”