Chichikov's main business, there is also Nozdryov, who lies from a sort of natural generative force, or the 'lady agreeable in all respects,' who lies from inner conviction), in such details as the elaborately negated description of Italy superimposed on Russia near the start of chapter 11, or the prosecutor's bushy eyebrows ('all you had, in fact, was bushy eyebrows'—which is literally true). The tremendous paradox of the title—Dead Souls—is fraught with all the ambiguities of this inverted realism. 'Everything resembles the truth.' Such is Gogol's artistic procedure, the plunging into bottomless physicality of. . . the word. That is, an airy nothing.
The characters Chichikov meets are not real-life landowners, not unspoiled Russian natures or general human types; like the hero himself, they are elemental banalities. In this they are quite unlike the exuberant 'souls' he resurrects from his chest. Gogol wrote in a letter of 1843:
I have been much talked about by people who have analyzed some of my aspects but failed to define my essence. Pushkin alone sensed it. He always told me that no other writer before has had this gift of presenting the banality of life so vividly, of being able to describe the banality of the banal man with such force that all the little details that escape notice flash large in everyone's eyes. That is my main quality, which belongs to me alone, and which indeed no other writer possesses.
The word translated as 'banality' here is the Russian poshlost. For a full comprehension of the meaning of poshlost (pronounced 'POSHlust'), readers are referred to Vladimir Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol (1944), which contains a twelve-page disquisition on the subject. Poshlost is a well-rounded, untranslatable whole made up of banality, vulgarity, and sham. It applies not only to obvious trash (verbal or animate), but also to spurious beauty, spurious importance, spurious cleverness. It is an ideal subject for Gogolian treatment, a 'gape in mankind,' as he calls Plyushkin, an absence he can bring to enormous presence by filling it with verbal matter. Gogol's portrayal of poshlost goes far beyond topical satire or a denunciation of social evils. His characters are not time bound; they inhabit an indefinitely expanded time in which they lose the sharply negative features of vice and wickedness and instead become wildly funny. They also have no psychology, no 'inner nature.' Nabokov thinks they are 'bloated dead souls' themselves, and that inside 'a poshlyak [a male embodiment of poshlost even of Chichikov's colossal dimensions' one can see 'the worm, the little shriveled fool that lies huddled up in the depth of the posh lost-painted vacuum.' But he is not quite right. There is no worm or shriveled fool inside Gogol's characters; they are all external, like landscapes. The process of 'growing wild' that has happened to Plyushkin's garden has also happened to Plyushkin himself. At the end of her chapter, Korobochka almost blends back into her barnyard. Everything around Sobakevich says, 'I, too, am Sobakevich.' Their very lack of inner life gives Gogol's characters a monumental stature, an almost mythical dimension.
But who has ever seen mythical figures of this sort? Looking at them, we may hear ourselves repeating the question Manilov puts to Chichikov: 'Here, it may be . . . something else is concealed ... ?' Yet it is all simply poshlost. But the more often Gogol repeats that everything he is describing is 'all too familiar' and 'the same everywhere,' the more exuberant is his verbal invention. He provokes a mutation in the scale of artistic values, as Sinyavsky says, an 'ostentation of language' grown out of the commonplace:
As a result, the everyday and the commonplace look somehow extraordinary in Gogol, owing already to the fact that the author, for no apparent reason, has turned his fixed attention on them. Things seem to hide or hold something in themselves, unreal in their real aspect, so wholly familiar that you cannot imagine they are just simply and causelessly standing there without signifying anything, though it is precisely their ordinary being before us and signifying nothing that constitutes their lot and their unsolved mystery.
The unsolved mystery of banality is the lining of the extraordinary behind it. It is Chichikov's chest with its double bottom, in which he stores all sorts of meaningless trash, but from which his 'dead souls' also emerge in procession and move across all Russia. It is the renewal and futurity inherent in the road, which Gogol celebrates. It is the sense of promise contained in laughter itself.
Richard Pevear Translators' Note Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father's first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic. A shortened form of the patronymic is sometimes used in conversation between acquaintances; thus Platon Mikhailovich Platonov, in the second volume of Dead Souls, is most often called Platon Mikhalych. Virtually all the names Gogol uses are perfectly plausible in Russian. Some of them, however, also have specific meanings or a more general suggestiveness. (In the following list, accented syllables are given in italics.)
Chichikov, Pavel Ivanovich: echoic of birds chirping and scissors snipping, it is a flighty, frivolous-sounding name, in apparent contrast to the hero's plumpness and practicality.
Manilov (no first name or patronymic): comes from manit, 'to lure, to beckon.' In sound it is moist-lipped, soft, and gooey.
Korobochka, Nastasya Petrovna: her family name means 'little box.'
Nozdryov (no first name or patronymic): comes from noz-drya, 'nostril,' and is suggestive of all sorts of holes and porosities.
Sobakevich, Mikhail Semyonovich: comes from sobaka, 'dog.'
Mikhail, Mikhailo, and the diminutives Misha and Mishka are common Russian names for bears. Plyushkin, Stepan (no patronymic): seems, on the other hand, to have no specific connotations.
Gogol plays with names in several other ways. Sometimes perfectly ordinary names become amusing when put together. So it is with Nozdryov's fellow carousers Potseluev (from 'kiss') and Kuvshinnikov (from 'jug'), as also with the dishonest clerks in volume 2— Krasnonosov, Samosvistov, and Kisloyedov (Red-noser, Self-whistler, and Sour-eater). At one point in chapter 8 he mocks Russian formal address by mercilessly listing the names and patronymics of a long series of ladies and gentlemen, ending in complete absurdity with the nonexistent Maklatura Alexandrovna.
Frequent reference is made in Dead Souls to various ranks of the imperial civil service. The following is a list of the fourteen official ranks established by Peter the Great in 1722, from highest to lowest:
1. chancellor
2. actual privy councillor
3. privy councillor
4. actual state councillor
5. state councillor
6. collegiate councillor
7. court councillor
8. collegiate assessor
9. titular councillor
10. collegiate secretary
11. secretary of naval constructions
12. government secretary
13. provincial secretary
14. collegiate registrar
The rank of titular councillor conferred personal nobility, and the rank of actual state councillor made it hereditary. Mention of an official's rank automatically indicates the amount of deference he must be shown, and by whom.
There are two words for 'peasant' in Russian: krestyanin and muzhik. The first is a more neutral and specific term; the second is broader, more common, and may be used scornfully. Gogol uses both words. Since muzhik has entered English, we keep it where
