Dead Souls

The plan of Chichikov, Gogol's hero-villain, was therefore to make a journey through Russia and buy up the "dead souls," at reduced rates of course, saving their owners the government tax, and acquiring a list of serfs that existed only on paper.

Chichikov's dead-souls scheme—purchase deceased serfs from provincial landowners, resell or mortgage them, exposure and flight—drives picaresque satire rather than moral resolution; Part I complete, Part II lost, so plot scores 89.

"I don't intend to be like a fellow named Plushkin, who owns eight hundred souls, yet dines worse than does my shepherd." "Who is Plushkin?" asked Chichikov. "A miser," replied Sobakevitch. "Such a miser as never you could imagine."

Chichikov the charming swindler, Manilov the sentimental idler, Korobochka, Nozdryov, Sobakevich, Plyushkin the hoarder—each landowner a caricature of Russian vice and folly, so cast scores 92.

To the door of an inn in the provincial town of N. there drew up a smart britchka—a light spring-carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, land-owners possessed of about a hundred souls, and, in short, all persons who rank as gentlemen of the intermediate category.

Eleven chapters of landowner visits and town comedy—each estate a set-piece before the ball and flight accelerate—tempo is episodic satire with cumulative social portrait, so pace scores 85.

In the britchka was seated such a gentleman—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. His arrival produced no stir in the town, and was accompanied by no particular incident.

Gogol's grotesque lyricism—Manilov's vapidity, Plyushkin's decay, the britchka fleeing—fuses comic exaggeration with moral indictment; the prose invents Russian literary satire, so prose scores 90.

To the door of an inn in the provincial town of N. there drew up a smart britchka—a light spring-carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, land-owners possessed of about a hundred souls.

Provincial town N., the landowners' estates, the Governor's ball, the posting-house—Russia under serfdom as social theater of greed, inertia, and bureaucratic absurdity, so world scores 91.

To the door of an inn in the provincial town of N. there drew up a smart britchka—a light spring-carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, land-owners possessed of about a hundred souls, and, in short, all persons who rank as gentlemen of the intermediate category.

Ch.I—Chichikov's arrival and the town's curiosity about the stranger—establishes mystery and social comedy before the dead-souls scheme emerges, so hook scores 86.

The plan of Chichikov, Gogol's hero-villain, was therefore to make a journey through Russia and buy up the "dead souls," at reduced rates of course, saving their owners the government tax, and acquiring a list of serfs that existed only on paper.

The dead-souls metaphor for a moribund society, the picaresque as national diagnosis, the landowner gallery as structural method—Gogol created the template for Russian satirical fiction, so innov scores 93.

Nevertheless not knowing what may conceivably be the best course to take, our coachman put away from him all ulterior reasoning, and, turning to the right at the next cross-road, shouted, "Hi, my beauties!" and set off at a gallop. Never for a moment did he stop to think whither the road might lead him!

Chichikov's flight amid town scandal—Part I ends on comic escape without redemption or completion; Gogol burned Part II, leaving the national epic deliberately unfinished, so ending scores 82.