7 Secrets of Dead Souls

1. The Secret of the Russian Peasants

In the first paragraph of Dead Souls, the carriage with Chichikov enters the provincial city of N.N.: “His arrival produced absolutely no noise in the city and was accompanied by nothing special; only two Russian peasants, standing by the doors of the tavern opposite the hotel, made some remarks…”

The specification that the peasants are “Russian” seems superfluous since the setting is obviously Russia. Literary historian Semyon Vengerov suggested this was because Gogol genuinely had little exposure to Russian (as opposed to Ukrainian) life, especially in the provinces, making the epithet significant to him. Vengerov was convinced Gogol would have deleted this “absurd” epithet had he paused to think.

However, Gogol did not delete it, and this is characteristic of the book’s poetics. Poet and philologist Andrey Bely called this the “figure of fiction,” where much is said, but nothing is actually conveyed; definitions do not define, and descriptions do not describe. The description of Chichikov himself is another example: he is “not handsome, but not bad-looking either, neither too fat nor too thin; one could not say he was old, yet he was not too young either,” a “gentleman of medium standing,” whose face the reader never truly sees.

2. The Secret of the Rainbow Kerchief

We first see Chichikov: “The gentleman took off his cap and unwound from his neck a woolen, rainbow-colored kerchief, such as a wife prepares for her husband with her own hands, supplying appropriate instructions on how to wrap up, and as for bachelors—I cannot say for sure who makes them, God knows…”

The narrator continues, “…I never wore such kerchiefs.” The description uses a typical Gogolian technique: an all-knowing tone (“I know everything about such kerchiefs”) abruptly shifts to the opposite (“I am a bachelor, I haven’t worn anything like that, I know nothing”). Hidden within this habitual technique and abundance of detail is the rainbow kerchief.

Writer Sergey Aksakov recalled an episode from 1839 where he saw Gogol in a “fantastic costume”: “his neck was wrapped in a large multi-colored scarf…” Chichikov’s kerchief and the scarf Aksakov saw on Gogol are undoubtedly related, a kinship deliberately obscured by the narrator. This suggests a kinship between the hero and the author. This is important because Chichikov is tasked with enormous responsibility for the novel’s future development in the promised second and third volumes. The narrator wonders about the secret behind the passion driving Chichikov: “And, maybe, in this very Chichikov, the passion that draws him is no longer from him, and within his cold existence is contained that which will later cast man down in the dust and on his knees before the wisdom of the heavens.” This kinship helps the reader to feel a connection with the unsympathetic hero and, consequently, to participate in the miracle of the world’s transformation.

3. The Secret of the Card Game

At the governor’s party, Chichikov sits down to play whist with the officials: “They sat down at the green table and did not get up until supper. All conversations completely ceased, as always happens when one finally devotes oneself to a serious pursuit (zanyatiyu delnomu).”

The author is being ironic by calling whist a “serious pursuit.” The word “delny” (serious/businesslike) is generally shrouded in irony in the text. However, in this context, “serious pursuit” is a phrase from card-playing jargon, meaning playing for money. Gogol’s point is not just about the officials’ distorted perception of business, but about the language itself having absorbed this distortion. Such “dead” words lose their primary meaning and act as “bog lights,” leading people astray: “And how many times, already guided by the meaning descending from the heavens, they [people] even here managed to turn away and go astray, managed in broad daylight to fall again into impassable wilderness, managed to put a blind fog back into each other’s eyes, and, dragging themselves along after the bog lights, managed to reach the abyss, only to then ask each other in horror: ‘Where is the way out, where is the road?'”

4. The Secret of the Fly in the Nose

Chichikov wakes up at Korobochka’s: “He woke up quite late the next morning. The sun shone directly into his eyes through the window, and the flies, which had been sleeping quietly on the walls and ceiling yesterday, all turned to him: one sat on his lip, another on his ear, a third was trying to settle right on his eye, and the one that had the imprudence to settle close to his nasal nostril, he drew in his sleep right into his nose, which made him sneeze very hard—a circumstance that was the cause of his awakening.”

This awakening is described in detail, contrasting with the general sleepiness in the narrative. His sensation is described almost exactly like the shock of the officials hearing of Chichikov’s fraud: “Their [the officials’] position at the first moment resembled the position of a schoolboy whose companions, having gotten up earlier, have put a hussar (a paper filled with tobacco) up his nose while he was sleeping. Drawing all the tobacco in with all the zeal of a sleeper, he wakes up, jumps up, looks around like a fool, with bulging eyes, and cannot understand where he is, what he is, what happened to him…”

The city’s agitation is described as the awakening of those who had been indulging in “corpse-like dreams.” This is a parodic resurrection of the dead. The city prosecutor, however, dies from the shock, and his death is paradoxical because it reveals his soul: “…They sent for a doctor to bleed him, but saw that the prosecutor was already a lifeless body. Only then did they learn with regret that the deceased had, in fact, a soul, although he, out of modesty, never showed it.”

The contrast between sleep and awakening is linked to the core themes of death and revival. The catalyst for awakening can be the most insignificant trifle—a fly, tobacco, or a strange rumor. The “resurrector,” Chichikov, does not need special virtues; he merely needs to break the familiar flow of life, acting as the fly in the nose.

5. How to Do Everything: Chichikov’s Secret

Chichikov is leaving Korobochka’s: “Although the day was very fine, the ground was so muddy that the wheels of the carriage, catching it, soon became covered with it like felt, which considerably weighed down the equipage; moreover, the soil was clayey and extraordinarily clinging. Both of these circumstances caused them not to be able to get out of the side roads until afternoon.”

Chichikov woke up at ten, yet in a little over two hours, he managed to have a long argument, buy 18 “revision souls” from Korobochka, and eat a substantial breakfast. How did Chichikov manage to do everything?

This is not the only example of Gogol’s free handling of time. When traveling from the city to Manilovka, Chichikov wears a “greatcoat on large bears,” and meets peasants in sheepskin coats—non-summer weather. Yet at Manilov’s house, he sees “bushes of lilacs and yellow acacias,” and women wading in a pond “up to their knees”—no coats. Upon waking at Korobochka’s, he sees “spacious vegetable gardens with cabbage, onions, potatoes, beets and other garden vegetables” and “fruit trees covered with nets,” again suggesting a different season.

The world of Dead Souls is a world without consistent time. The seasons do not follow sequentially but accompany a place or a character, becoming an additional characteristic. Time ceases to flow as expected, freezing in an “ugly eternity”—a “state of prolonged immobility,” according to philologist Mikhail Vaiskopf.

6. The Secret of the Guy with the Balalaika

Chichikov orders Selifan to leave at dawn, and Selifan scratches the back of his head. The narrator reflects on what this might mean: “Was it annoyance at the failure of a planned meeting for tomorrow with a comrade in an unsightly sheepskin coat… or had a new sweetheart already taken hold in the new place, and he had to abandon his evening standing by the gates and his polite holding of white hands just as dusk was settling over the city, and a lad in a red shirt strums a balalaika before the yard servants and the common, working people spin their quiet talk? <…> God knows, you can’t guess. Many different things are meant by the Russian people’s scratching of the back of the head.”

The lad with the balalaika has appeared before. When approaching Sobakevich’s porch, Chichikov noticed two faces looking out of the window: a woman’s face, “narrow, long, like a cucumber,” and a man’s, “round, wide, like Moldavian gourds, called gorlyanki, from which balalaikas are made in Russia, two-stringed, light balalaikas, the beauty and amusement of a brisk twenty-year-old fellow, a winker and a dandy…”

Gogol’s extended comparisons suddenly transition into an actual scene with the balalaika player. Such comparisons are a technique Gogol uses to expand the artistic world of the novel, inserting details that do not fit into the main travel plot or what Chichikov can see. Gogol then takes this dandy from a figure of speech and a comparison, and reintroduces him into the text, closer to the narrative reality. This allows a fictional figure to gain a place in the novel and eventually integrate into the plot.

7. The Secret of Corruption

Before the events of Dead Souls, Chichikov was part of a commission “for the construction of some government very capital building”: “For six years [the commission] busied itself around the building; but whether the climate interfered, or the material was such, the government building never rose above the foundation. And meanwhile, in other parts of the city, each of the members ended up with a beautiful house of civil architecture: clearly, the soil there was better.”

The phrase “civil architecture” fits Gogol’s redundant style where definitions are vague. However, the contrast was originally present: “civil architecture” was contrasted with church architecture. In an earlier draft, the commission Chichikov joined was “the commission for the construction of the Church of God.”

This episode is based on the well-known history of the construction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. The church was laid down in 1817. A commission was established in the early 1820s, and by 1827, abuses were discovered, the commission was abolished, and two of its members were put on trial. While these dates sometimes help date Chichikov’s biography, Gogol later removed the references to the church, making the project a generic “government building” and transforming the history into a mere element of style—the “civil architecture” that is no longer clearly contrasted with anything.

Sources

Bely A. Gogol’s Craftsmanship. Moscow, Leningrad, 1934.

Besprozvanny V., Permyakov E. From the Commentaries to the First Volume of “Dead Souls”. Tartu Notebooks. Moscow, 2005.

Vaiskopf M. Time and Eternity in Gogol’s Poetics. In: Vaiskopf M. The Troika-Bird and the Chariot of the Soul. Moscow, 2003.

Vengerov S. A. Gogol Completely Did Not Know Real Russian Life. In: Vengerov S. A. Collected Works. Vol. 2. St. Petersburg, 1913.

Lurie S. A. The Successes of Clairvoyance. St. Petersburg, 2002.

Mann Yu. V. Gogol’s Poetics. Variations on a Theme. Moscow, 1996.

Mann Yu. V. Where and When? In: Analysieren als Deuten: Wolf Schmid zum 60. Geburtstag. Hamburg, 2004.

Fomichev S. A. “Dead Souls”: The Inertia of the Conception and the Dynamics of Revelation. In: The Gogol Phenomenon. St. Petersburg, 2011.