Dead Souls (Wiseblood Classic)

DEAD SOULS follows the exploits of Chichikov, a middle-class gentleman who arrives unknown in a provincial town and immediately strives to make himself a respectable name by impressing the local officials. Though of limited means, he spends copiously, convinced that an initial display of wealth and power will help him to acquire the connections he needs to live a sumtuous life. Part of his plan to gain stability and status revolves around his absurd and mysterious plan to acquire "dead souls," to purchase dead serfs from landowners in order to trick the tax-collectors in a game of get rich quick.

TRANSLATOR: D.J. Hoggarth

Vladimir Nabokov contended that Gogol's DEAD SOULS is predominantly concerned with "poshlust," which, translated imperfectly, means, "cheap, sham, common. . . high flautin, in bad taste." Chichikov is almost an archetype of "poshlust." Described as a golden mean, "a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young," Chichikov incarnates the peak of false-respectability, pretension, and self-interest. As "Russian" as both the protagonist and the very word and concept of "poshlust" are, and even as the narrative unfolds in a provincial Russian town (so provincial it is known only as N--), Gogol's vision is "catholic" in the literal sense: its revelatory power is universal, soliciting laughter and gasps through his hilariously terrifying portraits. Of Chichikov Professor William Phelps writes that "no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of his tongue." Still further, Chichikov is not simply a caricature of someone other than ourselves. In the interpretive essay included in this WISEBLOOD CLASSICS edition, William Weathers insists that "Gogol knew that Everyman by becoming a dead soul can find himself in a virtual hell on earth, a village of N--, regardless of place or century. Dead Souls, then, is a great moral statement on your journey and mine through reality, or at least on our condition within reality."

Wiseblood Books is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope.

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