5/30/2023 0 Comments Gogol lost soulsThe Kukryniksy (Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiri Krylov, Nikolai Sokolov). Each reacts to this unconventional proposal differently. Chichikov visits local landlords and asks them to sell him these dead souls. So, even if any of the peasants died, the landowner still paid taxes on them and they were listed as living until the next revision. Each landowner in Russia had a list of serfs that was updated only once every few years. So, he decides to resort to a trick facilitated by Russian bureaucracy. However, the problem is that he does not have a single “soul”, that is, he has no serfs. Here is the plot synopsis: A member of minor nobility named Pavel Chichikov arrives in a small town and, in order to gain influence in society, pretends to be a landowner. Commenting on the first chapters written by Gogol (which were not included in the final version of the first volume), the great poet Alexander Pushkin said: “God, how sad our Russia is!” That was the inferno part and it turned out really good: Gogol depicts a rich palette of bad characters and a wide range of various vices. It is the first volume, which was printed in 1842, that we know today as ‘Dead Souls’. Russian literature’s most famous satirist planned his most famous work to consist of three parts, in the format of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ - with its own inferno, purgatory and paradise.
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