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Dead Souls: Poems (Penguin Classics)

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Gogol’s best-known tale, “The Overcoat,” is a study in subtraction. How much can you take from a person while leaving him, if just barely, human? The hero, Akaky Akakievich— kakat in Russian baby-talk means “to shit”—has, literally and figuratively, almost no words of his own. He uses filler after meaningless filler— er, you know, well, like—and sometimes never gets any further. He is not only a copying clerk—a sort of human Xerox machine—he also finds in copying “a vision of his own multifarious and pleasant world…. Some of the letters were his favorites, and when he got to them he was beside himself.” At home, he makes copies for his own pleasure. Radio Liberty, transcript of a talk from cycle "Heroes of the Time", host:Петр Вайль, guests: culturologist Мариэтта Чудакова and actors Archil Gomiashvili (Bender-1971) and Sergey Yursky (Bender-1993) Find sources: "Plyushkin"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( December 2009) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Mirskij, Dmitrij Petrovič, A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900, ed. by Francis J. Whitfield (Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp. 160

And pursuing his clandestine aims he started making visits to the neighbouring estates… And his purposes were pretty weird and peculiar… This isn't that kind of a supernatural book though, buying dead souls (the title was originally censored because as the Church teaches souls are immortal and can't be dead) was a reasonable financial undertaking at the time. Serfs could be mortgaged by their owners. Censuses in Imperial Russia were only undertaken once every twenty-five years and peasants who had died since the last one enjoyed a strange half-life in which they could still be mortgaged even though as assets they were completely non-liquid (at least financially speaking) since they were securely lodged in the graveyard. So we find our hero, or "hero", travelling about, meeting various members of the nobility and attempting to buy their dead souls from them.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST PORTION OF THIS WORK

Returning to town, Chichikov, like the devil, peruses with delight the list of souls he has acquired. When he is asked if he has sufficient land for so many serfs, he replies, “As much as will suffice for the peasants I bought.” Someone worries about an uprising among these uprooted people, but Chichikov explains that they “were extraordinarily docile in character.” In the process we learn about life in Russia at the time: masters and peasants He travels by coach with two servants and goes to a lot of taverns gambling. Each negotiation to buy serfs is different. We attend high society balls. The author comments a lot on language – Russian and French; the provinces vs. the cities and “we Russians” vs. French, British, Germans and English. There’s humor but ultimately hopelessness of ever changing the conditions of serfdom.

En su obra encontramos sus cuentos más inmortales como "El Capote", "La Naríz", "Viy", "Diario de un Loco", esta novela, "Tarás Bulba" y obras de teatro "El Inspector", las cuales son pruebas inequívocas de su maestría literaria. Sometimes Chichikov has trouble making a landowner understand his proposition. Korobochka, the narrator explains, is one of those people who, no matter what arguments you use, cannot shift their way of thinking. She worries that she “might take a loss somehow.” To no avail does Chichikov ask, How can you take a loss on nothing, and how can you need something that exists only on paper? Another landowner, Sobakevich, drives a hard bargain: “You hold a human soul at the same value as a boiled turnip. Give me three rubles at least.” When Sobakevich claims to be “taking a loss,” Chichikov points out that what he is selling is nothing, a fiction, an insubstantial shadow, a puff of air, of no good to anyone. Perhaps so, Sobakevich replies, but then, of what good are the living? “They are so many flies, not people!”In the concluding chapter, I had a similar bamboozling experience. This time, the explanation about the dead souls came directly from Chichikov but even while I was reading it, the meaning just wafted away from me like wisps of smoke, impossible to grasp. Bernard Guilbert Guerney (published by the New York Readers' Club, revised 1948, and again by Susanne Fusso in 1996). Considered to be the best English version by Vladimir Nabokov, with the qualification that no later translations had yet been released at the time of his study in 1944. [12] Nikolai Gogol, the Ukrainian godfather of Russian literature. Considered a leading figure in Russian literary realism, a title and movement he rejected, hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as the greatest writer Russia has ever produced, he has influenced the writings of generations of Russian writers from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Mikhail Bulgakov. One of literatures great contradictions, Gogol is a Ukrainian hailed a Great Russian, a celebrated Realist who wrote surrealist masterpieces. In fact the life of Gogol reads like one of his stories. A writer celebrated for founding a movement he wants no part of sets out to write a piece rivaling Dante’s The Divine Comedy or Homer’s The Odyssey, only to die before its completion. If as critics suggest The Overcoat symbolizes Gogol’s literary genius then Dead Souls has become the symbol of the author’s descent into madness. Representing perhaps an Icarus moment where life imitates art, does Gogol’s notorious masterpiece really define one of literatures true originals, or is it an extreme case of the ‘tortured artist’ romanticized?

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