The 305 Greatest Books - #186: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Dead Souls by Nicolai Gogol. The book can be found on the Norwegian 100 Greatest Book List. 

I had been interested in Gogol ever since reading The Namesake, where the primary character in that story is named after the author of this story. Dead Souls is the only story by Gogol on my list, and it has been waiting patiently for me to read it ever since I read The Namesake probably about 20 years previously. Dead Souls starts out with a translators note, which made all the difference in understanding this book. In Russia, during the 1800's, a peasant was bound to the land and subject to the landowner. Each peasant pays the landowner a tax and the landowner then pays the collected taxes to the government for every person, or "soul", that is on the property. The number of souls that each landowner owes money on is determined during the census, which has large gaps in time (the story takes place in a gap of 18 years between censuses). If a peasant was to die during that time between censuses, the landowner would still owe taxes on that peasant until the next census identified them as dead. These are the "dead souls". The premise of the novel is that a businessman named Chichikov has come up with a scheme where he goes around buying up the dead souls of the landowners. The first volume of the book basically follows him around as he attempts to buy these dead souls off of various people until the last chapter of the volume where we find out his background and why he is doing what he is doing. And let me tell you, I read that section three times and I still couldn't figure it out the reasoning. This is the whole premise of the novel so you would think it should be well laid out, but no, not a clue. The second volume of the story helped to make some sense of it but it still doesn't make total sense. It may be an issue where things are done differently now, so his scheme wouldn't work, or that there are key parts that are not explained since they would be known at the time, or it could be that his scheme doesn't actually make sense and there was no fixing it so the author just glossed over that fact, either way, it made for a disappointing read since that was the whole premise of the book. (I could explain but I don't want to give too many spoilers). I have always been a fan of Russian literature, and while the author was born in present day Ukraine, he lived in the Russia of the time and wrote in Russian. Generally from what I have read, translations from Russian to English are usually very well done, this one included, and it made reading and understanding the text to be a breeze. I greatly enjoyed that part. But there are issues with the story, besides just the enigmatic justification for the story. Apparently, Gogol had based his publishing volume 2 of the story contingent on volume 1 doing well. However it apparently didn't, so he ended up destroying parts of the manuscript. So there are parts of sentences, pages, and even whole chapters just missing from the story (and noted as such by the translator). So whatever happens in Volume 2 is sometimes summarized by the translator because an unknown number of chapters is just ... gone. I had hoped it would be something akin to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but no such luck. It just feels incomplete and lacking in the end. Not enough answers for the questions raised and a lackluster finish to a story that started out interesting.