It’s not what you know that helps a man get ahead, it’s who you know and he plans to know all the right people so that he can achieve his bizarre goal. (Chapter 10 where he dissects Chichikov’s character in detail is almost postmodern in the way that Gogol analyses his own story).Ĭhichikov is a man of only moderate means, but when the story begins in the un-named town of N-, he spends lavishly to impress the local officials. At the same time, Gogol mocks the pretensions of his central character Chichikov, using him to mock the novel itself because his hero isn’t likely to impress anybody. This spoof is partly Gogol satirising the bureaucratic tardiness of the census, partly poking fun at the idea that social status can be based on ownership of dead names on paper, and partly having a go at the greed and stupidity of the landowners – because when Chichikov offers to buy up these souls, he is met with the suspicion that he is ripping them off or breaking the law, and there is hard bargaining to get a better deal for them. The dead souls are serfs who are registered in the census as part of a landowner’s property, but though the landowner still has to pay tax on them, are (obviously) no longer alive. It’s the story of Chichikov, who travels around provincial Russia on a quest to buy ‘dead souls’. Dead Souls is Nikolai Gogol’s masterpiece, and it’s very droll indeed.
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