Nikolai Gogol published the first volume of Dead Souls in 1842, intending it as the first part of a three-part work he never completed. Pavel Chichikov, a government official of studied respectability and obscure background, arrives in a provincial Russian town and sets about purchasing, from local landowners, the names of serfs who have died since the last census but have not yet been struck from official records, "dead souls" who still exist on paper and can therefore be pledged as assets to obtain a bank mortgage. The scheme provides Gogol with an occasion to portray a series of landowners, each a study in a different variety of provincial Russian human failure.
Each landowner Chichikov visits is a comic type pressed to the edge of grotesque: Manilov, whose sentimental refinement has produced a household of comfortable decay and no useful activity; Korobochka, whose peasant prudence extends to every transaction including the sale of dead serfs she worries she may be underselling; Nozdryov, whose aggressive dishonesty cannot be modulated for the purposes of negotiation; Plyushkin, the miser so advanced in his avarice that his hoard of rotting food and decaying objects has merged into a landscape of general dissolution. Gogol frames the novel through the metaphor of a troika speeding forward, Russia itself, with the question of where it is going left deliberately unanswered.
Dead Souls is one of the funniest novels in Russian literature and one of the strangest, combining picaresque comedy with a lyricism that periodically interrupts the satirical register with passages of genuine beauty. The portrait of Russian bureaucracy and its relationship to the gap between official record and material reality, dead serfs who exist legally but not physically, is a comic device that touches on something Gogol knew was not comic at all. The novel's incompleteness is itself meaningful: Gogol's inability to write the regeneration he promised is a fact about his creative life as honest as anything in the finished volume.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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