Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Published 1842 · 314 pages · 141,884 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor

How hard is Dead Souls to read?

Dead Souls scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
19th-century Russian rendered accessibly. Some terms related to serfdom require context.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Gogol's digressions create long, winding passages. The narrator interrupts himself frequently.
Abstraction: 50 out of 100
Primarily satirical observation grounded in concrete scenes. Allegory emerges from accumulation.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Episodic structure allows absorption of each character portrait before moving on.
Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
Third-person following Chichikov, with authorial digressions. Straightforward despite pyrotechnic prose.
Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
The dead souls themselves are powerfully symbolic. The troika passage lifts into national allegory.
Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
Gogol's narrator mocks everyone, including himself. Sustained ironic stance throughout.
Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
The novel is famously incomplete. Chichikov's scheme is exposed but his ultimate fate unknown.
Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
Picaresque visits to landowners with frame of the con. Incomplete second part creates structural oddness.

How Dead Souls is regarded

Dead Souls holds a literary regard score of 91 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Dead Souls sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (285 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Dead Souls scores 84 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Yet, though he could not, to save his life, take a person of virtue for his principal character, it may be that this story contains themes never before selected
Symbol: Formal
Mythos: Irony/Satire, Phase 3 — Satire of the High Norm (verbal tempest, encyclopedic) (irony iii)
Then WHAT is he? A villain? Why should we call him a villain? ... Rather it would be fairer to call him an ACQUIRER.
Genre: Anatomy + Novel
Obviously, this plot, which is really no plot at all but merely a ruse to enable Chichikov to go across Russia in a troika

Where the story of Dead Souls takes place

  • Provincial Russia under Nicholas I, c. 1830s (1830 to 1842), the main setting

6 things that are true of Dead Souls, with the passage for each

  1. Chichikov proposes to buy serfs who have died but still appear on the census list.

    “All that I am proposing to do,” replied Chichikov, “is to purchase the dead peasants who, at the last census, were returned by you as alive.”

  2. Manilov agrees to give the dead souls away for nothing.

    I, on my side, shall be ready to surrender to you those souls UNCONDITIONALLY, and to charge myself with the whole expenses of the sale.

  3. Nozdrev tries to cheat Chichikov at chess by slipping in an extra piece.

    “No, no!” shouted Chichikov as he rose from the table. “It is impossible to play with a man like you. People don’t move three pieces at once.”

  4. Plushkin, a rich landowner, gives his whole household only one pair of boots.

    The reason why he had entered thus shod was that Plushkin only kept one pair of boots for the whole of his domestic staff.

  5. The town believes Chichikov is Captain Kopeikin, until someone notes Kopeikin had lost an arm and a leg.

    “Allow me,” put in the Head of the Police Department. “You have said that Kopeikin had lost an arm and a leg; whereas Chichikov—”

  6. The surviving text ends mid-sentence in the Prince's speech.

    in that before us the future looms dark, and that we can scarcely....

Scenes in Dead Souls that Frye would name

22 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Lyric, untitled
Ah, Russia, Russia, from my beautiful home in a strange land I can still see you! An overheard lyrical apostrophe breaking the narrative.
Lyric, untitled
Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes—only the weird sound of your collar-bells. The famous troika ode, an anagogic lyric that ends in silence.
Alazon, untitled
being a worm of no account in the world, he was deserving of no consideration at the hands of his fellows; that in his time he had undergone many strange experiences Chichikov, the impostor, wins a town with false modesty and a manufactured past.
Anatomy, untitled
In Russian society there exist clever folk who can speak in one manner to a landowner possessed of two hundred peasant souls, and in another to a landowner possessed of three hundred An encyclopedic digression classifying the shades of Russian social address.
Anatomy, untitled
In passing, I may say that in business matters fat men always prove superior to their leaner brethren A narrator's digressive taxonomy of fat and thin officials in the ballroom.
Demonic imagery, untitled
Entering a large, dark hall which reeked like a tomb Plushkin's estate is a tomb-like place of living death and rot.

Books that share these scenes with Dead Souls

About the author

Nikolai Gogol