The lively wit of "Dead Souls"

Since first reading a Russian novel translated by the incomparable team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, theirs are the only versions I seek. I just completed their translation of Gogol’s 1842 “Dead Souls,” and the reputations of all three writers remain intact with me.

Gogol's novel is characterized by satiric portraits of a catalog of Russian “types” – from indolent layabout landowners to preening petty officials to self-made philosophers of every ilk – and rapturous descriptions of rolling landscapes very much like the duo’s dreamlike translation of Chekov’s “The Steppe.” (Read that, too!)

Everything about this prose and the characters that inhabit it is larger than life.

Gogol follows his protagonist, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, on his journey from village estate to village estate seeking to buy dead souls. Russian serfs were called “souls” – or at least in all English translations – and a man’s wealth would be assessed not in acreage, but in souls. “He has 1,000 souls!” The vain, charming in first impression and wholly underwhelming Chichikov travels across the landscape in search of dead souls. I can see Peter Ustinov is the title role.

Because serfs were wealth, the landowner was taxed for each soul annually. But the census was conducted just once a decade, so a man would be taxed for dead souls until the next head count. Chichikov’s scheme was to buy dead souls for a pittance (they did not exist, after all), thus relieving their nominal owners of the tax burden, in order to accumulate an impressive personal estate on paper to help obtain loans and mortgages.

Moving from household to household, each full of sufficient detail to elucidate Russian life to the modern reader, Chichikov leads the reader on a tour of the Russian soul. Gogol’s vivid eye for detail, whether of character or household or landscape, is matched only by his endless wry humor. Gogol ends a chapter with our hero Chichikov exhausted from his day’s chicanery and falling into bed, where he “… fell asleep soundly, deeply, fell asleep in the wondrous way that they alone sleep who are so fortunate as to know nothing of hemorrhoids, or fleas, or overly powerful mental abilities.”

As Russian novels go, "Dead Souls" is short (about 400 pages) and sweet indeed.