Reading 1001 discussion

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
3 stars

I read this for my Page Turners book discussion group this month. These reads, and this book is no exception, are usually from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Although I can't say that I enjoyed reading this book, there were certainly aspects of it that at least held my attention most of the time. As the main protagonist, Chichikov, roams around the countryside attempting to purchase the souls of dead farm workers, the reader meets an assortment of quirky characters who each have a different take on what Chichikov is doing and so a different response. He is convinced that he will be able to make an easy profit off these purchases and throughout the book I just kept thinking...if he could just use his intellect for something good rather than profiting from the "easy" way. Then at some point (I wish I had bookmarked the spot and could quote it), someone in the book actually makes that same reference. I really enjoyed the sections when Gogol described the countryside, or the foods or the interiors of some of the homes that he visited. His descriptions were so wonderfully done that it was easy to picture these settings. I thought it was interesting that there were so many sections, towards the end of the book that had been lost or were illegible. The truth of the matter is that I really didn't miss those sections nor did they seem to interfere with the reading, which just emphasizes the fact that I really didn't follow the entire story line very well.

4 Stars
Read June 2016

This book really surprised me. Based upon the title and cover, I expected a very dark, bleak, and depressing book (like many of the books on this list). I was quite wrong. It was actually lighthearted and humorous, even when broaching serious topics. I enjoyed the detail and descriptions about Russian life during the time of the tsars. It is unfortunate that parts of the book were destroyed by the author. The second half of the book was not as cohesive as the first, as a result. Despite that, still quite enjoyable.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars, TBR takedown 2019
Dead Souls was published in 1842 and is a classic work, considered a mix of realism and symbolism. It is a tale of a man set on buying dead serfs. Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov travels around and the reader is introduced to a variety of people of Russia. I got that it was a satire and that there were layers of meaning here. The serfs were counted as "souls" but on another level, the souls refer to the dead souls of Gogol's characters. I enjoyed it and it is deserving of another read. It really is unfinished but you don't really notice that.

Dead Souls surprised me. It was amusing, full of authorial asides and repetition for effect. I was expecting something much more dour. The premise is that the protagonist, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, devises a scheme to "buy" dead souls ie serfs who have died since the last census, for whom landowners were still liable to pay tax. Landowners owned serfs and could raise mortgages on them, which Chichikiv intended to do in order to become a landowner himself. His convoluted scheme, pretending to already be a landowner in order to buy the dead serfs, seemed much trickier to achieve than more orthodox methods may have been. The title is a play on the serfs, who were actually referred to as souls in official censuses (censi?) and the dead souls of Chichikov himself and the landowners he meets on his travels. Gogol was Ukrainian, and there are many references to "Little Russia" ie the Ukraine, but he waxes lyrical about the typical Russian soul. I have only once travelled through the Russian countryside, on a train journey from Beijing to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but Gogol's description of Russian countryside was most evocative of what I had seen in the summer of 1990. The real joy of the book, though, was the description of people. They were caricatures, really, but superbly drawn, so that although the descriptions were amusing, they were realistic enough. I did not realise why the second volume was so much shorter than the first until I had finished, and read that Gogol had burnt his manuscript and starved hinmself to death despite the huge success of volume one. So I found the reason why the second volume was such an unsatisfactory read. I could understand that comeuppances were in order, but how they were to be achieved remained opaque. Nevertheless this was a 4 star read.