Dead Souls: Poems (Penguin Classics)

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Almas Muertas, por consiguiente es un libro largo, de apretadas y densas líneas, pero que son necesarias para desplegar toda la historia de Chichikov, este hombre tan particular que fatiga las estepas rusas en busca de hacendados que le vendan las almas, es decir los campesinos, que tienen en su poder y que han muerto pero que todavía aparecen en el Censo como vivos que realizaba el Estado ruso entre los terratenientes. Only at the tale’s conclusion does Gogol’s narrator reflect that these events are “indeed strange” ( tochno stranno)—as if he isn’t too sure and wants to preclude doubt. Andrew MacAndrew’s translation dampens the joke by referring simply to the event’s “strangeness.” In Fusso’s version the narrator identifies something still stranger: “How did Kovalyov not realize that you cannot go to a newspaper office to place an advertisement about a nose?” Like any good humorist, Gogol ends the sentence with the funniest word— nose—but other translators—MacAndrew, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and Constance Garnett—all end it with the newspaper office. Fusso’s ear for humor makes all the difference. And pursuing his clandestine aims he started making visits to the neighbouring estates… And his purposes were pretty weird and peculiar…

Pero permítame preguntarle –dijo Manilof-, ¿cómo desea usted comprarlos, con tierras o sencillamente para llevárselos, sin tierras? 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!” To pay for his trip, he appropriated the money his mother had sent to pay the mortgage on their estate in Ukraine. Justifying himself, he composed a letter inventing a failed romance with an inaccessible “goddess lightly clothed in human passion,” an ethereal being “whose shattering splendor impresses itself upon the heart.” But why go abroad? In a second letter, in which he apparently forgot what he had said in the first, he explained that he sought treatment for a terrible rash. Putting two and two together, his mother concluded that he had contracted a venereal disease from a courtesan, a conclusion all the more odd because for his whole life Gogol was repulsed by sexuality. The other interesting thing about the Kopeykin tale, told after all in such a different style, was that it reminded me of inserted stories in Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses which I'm currently reading, specifically Book Four where Ovid allows a couple of his characters to tell stories in their own voices using their own verse style. Unlike Narcissus, I'm always on the lookout for echoes...And finally there's Plyushkin, who has suffered about as much travail as Job. Needless to say, he's eager to sell his dead souls to Chichikov.

It's about a crook, Pavel Ivanovich Tchitchikov. The latter has an extraordinary idea to make a fortune: he will redeem dead souls. The Kukryniksy (Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiri Krylov, Nikolai Sokolov). Illustration for ‘Dead Souls’. Nozdrev and ChichikovIn the britzka sat a gentleman, not handsome, but also not bad-looking, neither too fat nor too thin; you could not have said he was old, yet neither was he all that young.

Shapiro, Marianne. "Gogol and Dante". Modern Language Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1987),p. 37-38 Nozdryov is another landowner from whom Chichikov is trying to buy dead peasant souls. Nozdryov is a widower, left with two kids he has no interest in so leaves them to the nanny. He's a frivolous party animal who loves cards and is always getting into fights and getting tossed from social gatherings. He's also a pathological liar. Though he seems brisk and energetic, he's glib, has no ideas and plans nothing. He's just passing through like another dead soul. Chichikov continues to visit local landowners and buy their dead souls, but, at some point, the box with all his papers is stolen. In addition, it becomes clear that someone is informing on Chichikov and his machinations. Chichikov, who, in the first volume, did not express any strong feelings, here becomes desperate, almost tearing his hair out. However, here the manuscript ends and we shall never find out what happened to him. Why did Gogol think the second volume was no good? When it comes out that he has been buying dead souls, the townspeople labor to understand why anyone would want them. Perhaps, they reflect, the very phrase “dead souls” has a hidden meaning, which each person discovers to be his own worst transgression. For that matter, they ask, who is Chichikov? Perhaps he is a government inspector in disguise? The fact that he doesn’t act as if he is in disguise only proves how good a disguise it is. Farfetched theories generate still more farfetched theories. Could Chichikov be Napoleon, who has somehow escaped from Elba and sneaked into Russia to corner the market on dead souls? Maybe he is really…the antichrist? If readers object that all this is quite improbable, the narrator remarks, they should watch how scholars develop their favorite theories. Isabel Hapgood (trans.); Nicolai Gogol (1886). "Tchitchikoff's journeys; or Dead Souls. A Poem". archive.org . Retrieved 12 September 2016.Illustration by Alexander Agin: The Simply Pleasant Lady and The Lady Who Is Pleasant In All Respects