What I wrote after I finished part one of Gogol's Dead Souls

First and foremost: is this translation right for you? I read somewhere that Garnett is comparable to eating a healthy salad while Pevear and Volokhonsky are akin to a spicy dish. And that's exactly what you'll get here: more subtle humor in a very tidy package.

At any rate, Dead Souls is different from most anything most immediately because Gogol uses it as an opportunity to teach the reader how to look beyond the text and between the lines to discover why things are in the book and how they relate to the story - he compares one man's living room accents to the man himself, for example. For long stretches, he maintains a healthy dialogue that is never boring, condescending, or excessive.

It's also through this method that Gogol pushes the reader to realize that good characters can't be merely honorable and without blemishes, because such people are boring and, furthermore, nonexistent. The story's "hero," Chichikov, is hardly introduced at the beginning and is therefore easily comparable to a sleazy businessman with some clever plot to become rich and famous. It's not until the final chapter of Book One (the only one that Gogol truly finished) that we really get any background on him, which is when we learn how he got to his desperate situation and we realize that, while he is truly a "bad guy," his motives aren't entirely selfish, that he is desperately trying to build an estate to bequeath to his future progeny. And it's this kind of mixture that Gogol spreads across the town of N.: characters that probably don't exist in real life, but highlight some positive and negative aspects of contemporary Russian society.

And that leads to the last important aspect of Dead Souls: Gogol's sometimes-strained love for Russia. These characters show problems in Russian society, but he explains that most of these are universal (at least amongst the Russian person). Gogol's main argument is against the ever-present theme of contemporary Russian literature: the battle between East and West Europe. In short, we see the influence of an outsider (Chichikov) and that of the countries themselves, especially the infiltration of French culture in Russia's aristocracy.

But what is most remarkable is how Gogol pushes the reader to realize all these things while maintaining the levity and complexity of his short stories (though nowhere near as outlandish as "The Nose"). It's a bit sad that Gogol destroyed much of what he had composed for Book Two, but what is there is undoubtedly a classic.