“Dead Souls,” the masterpiece of Gogol, is not very widely known among English readers, but it is entitled to a high rank in literature. Perhaps the fact that it is a torso has been one cause of this neglect, for before the second volume was finished the author was overtaken by that madness which clouded his last days. But the first volume is practically complete in itself. It records the efforts of the smug, shrewd, rascally Tchitschikoff to procure from various landowners certain paper transfers of the serfs who had died on their estates since the last enumeration in order to effect a fraudulent loan by means of a list corresponding with the official register. The description of the stranger, of his sudden arrival in a provincial city, of the various estates he visits and the remarkable people he encounters, and then, while his enterprise is prospering, of the sudden spreading of the scandal through the town and his forced flight to other regions—these things are told with a power of portraiture which is amazing. The characters he describes are sometimes grotesque, but they are faithful to the essentials of human nature; even the wild Nozdreff and the massive Sobakevitch are very real. Gogol has been called the Dickens of Russian literature,and his portraits, while fewer in number and variety, are less like puppets than many of those drawn by the English novelist. His description of Pliushkin the miser is quite as striking as that of L’Avare of Molière or Père Grandet of Balzac, while his account of the way the gossip regarding Tchitschikoff started and circulated is as fine as anything in “The School for Scandal.” He calls his book a “poem,” and although it is quite devoid of versification or lofty diction, yet if the word “poem” means a “work of original creative art,” “Dead Souls” will fully justify the name.
It has the same sort of masterly quality as “Don Quixote,” and transports us as completely to the scenes which it describes. His patriotic apostrophe to Russia in the final chapter, and his description of the swift flight of the hero in his troika, are picturesque and eloquent to the last degree.