There were a lot of pieces missing in the second half that made it impossible to keep track of anything resembling a plot. Obviously a weakness in the story is that it's unfinished (or finished but partially burned or whatever the case may be). Gogol had a very strong grasp on characters, and I think that is why he excelled so much at the short story format. That came through really well in his characters, who were more often than not more caricatures than anything else. Gogol had a very keen eye for detail and he obviously was very aware of the intricacies and hilarities of human interaction.

I have a very clear picture in my head of how ridiculous Manilov must have looked. Here Manilov, with a slight motion of his head, cast a very meaningful look at Chichikov, all his features and his pursed lips taking on an expression of such profundity as had perhaps never before been beheld on a human face, except perhaps for that of some excessively clever Minister of State, and even then at a moment of the utmost mental exertion. For example, during a conversation, he describes someone's facial expression as so: He could really turn a phrase and present a very vivid picture in your mind. Below are our thoughts on Dead Souls.Īarti: I think Gogol was really really good at writing & describing characters. We next plan to read The Tale of the Genji (the short version). I read this book in a long-distance classics book club with my friend Sudha, who lives in St. You just continue reading, hoping for another character to get skewered. So that you don't even mind that the story ends abruptly, or that Part II is comprised only of bits and fragments that do not fit together. And those are what make the book so funny, so fascinating to read. It is there only as a vehicle to get across Gogol's other points. The plot is not in any way central to the story. His narrator goes off on asides describing the scenery, obscene amounts of food, and making commentary on the state of Russia and the world.

However, Gogol rarely sticks to the general plot, taking off on hilarious tangents of describing coachmen, ornery old women, tight-fisted landowners, self-important government workers and all sorts of people in between. This is the general plot of the story, if it can be called that. By purchasing large numbers of people that he does not actually have to transport or care for, Chichikov hopes to cheat the census system and qualify as a landowner. It centers on a man named Chichikov, who comes into a town, makes friends with the officials, and then visits the surrounding landowners, asking them somewhat incongruously if he can buy 'souls' (serfs) from them- but only the dead ones. Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol is one of the first Russian novels.

Gogol lost souls