Dead Souls

Picture a polite, well-fed stranger seated across the table from a country landowner, naming a price for the serfs who have died since the last census but linger on the tax rolls as though they still breathed. That is Chichikov's scheme, and the provinces oblige him: estate by estate he gathers the dead, and estate by estate Gogol uncovers the living, from the sugary dreamer Manilov to old Plyushkin, a miser who has hoarded himself down to something barely human. The comedy is merciless, and the sorrow beneath it never fully lifts, because the joke keeps turning out to be true. Gogol conceived the book as the inferno of a Dantean epic; in a crisis of conscience he burned the road toward paradise, and died before he could write it again. What remains is the laughter and the long open road, and that startling moment near the end when the whole country becomes a hurtling troika: Russia, whither flyest thou? She gives no answer, and the silence is the entire book.