The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Nikolai Gogol · a poem in prose · the first volume, in eleven chapters · Moscow, 1842 · scored on Gogol’s Russian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, each quotation with a plain English rendering beneath, and no published translation quoted
Mode
Picaresque satire called a poem; road novel, comedy of types and lyrical digression in one narration
Mythos
The purchase of souls as a descent, house below house, to a man become a rent in humanity; the devil as a smooth official; the road and the troika as the nation in flight
Phase
From a britzka’s arrival in the town of N., through five visits, the registering of the deeds, a ball and the town’s rumours, to a hurried departure on the road
Presentation
Fiction; eleven chapters, the first volume of a design never completed, with the Tale of Captain Kopeikin told inside the tenth and the hero’s history held back to the eleventh
Register
From the bargaining dialogue and the officials’ talk to epic similes that outgrow their occasion and the lyrical apostrophe to Rus
Scale
One buyer, five landowners and a provincial town; serfdom, the census and the offices of the state
Governing Proposition
A pleasant gentleman named Chichikov arrives in a provincial town, charms every official in it, and drives out to five landowners in turn to buy from each, on paper, the serfs who have died since the last census and still stand on the tax rolls; the deeds are registered, the town turns the purchases into rumours, and he leaves at speed on a road that becomes the troika of Rus. The wager of the book is that a society which counts persons as property on a list has made the dead negotiable and the living dead, and that a comedy of bargains, told by a narrator who calls his prose a poem, can show it and rise from it to the nation.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A britzka drives into the provincial town of N. and stops at the inn. Two peasants at a door watch it pass and debate whether its wheel would hold out as far as Moscow. The gentleman inside is neither one thing nor another, and he is pleasant to everyone. Within days he has called on the governor and on every official who matters, praised each for what each most wished to be praised for, and been asked everywhere. At the governor’s party the black tailcoats move about the bright room like flies on sugar on a summer day, and the simile, once begun, goes on living for its own sake long after the tailcoats are forgotten. His name is Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a collegiate councillor.
What he wants is in the law. Serfs, “revision souls”, were counted at each census and remained on the tax rolls until the next, even if they died in between, and their owners paid the tax on them. Chichikov means to buy the dead on paper, cheaply or for nothing, and mortgage them as living to the Board of Trustees. He tells no one why, and the book keeps the secret too, until the last chapter, so that every bargain is watched first as a riddle: a stranger who asks to buy what does not exist, and five landowners, each of whom answers the question in the shape of his own life.
The volume has eleven chapters. Chichikov arrives (1); visits Manilov (2), Korobochka (3), Nozdryov (4), Sobakevich (5) and Plyushkin (6); has the deeds registered at the civil chamber (7); and goes to the governor’s ball, where Nozdryov tells the room what he has been buying (8). The town fills with rumour (9); the officials confer, hear the Tale of Captain Kopeikin, and the prosecutor dies (10); Chichikov leaves, and his history is told (11). It was published in Moscow in 1842. Gogol called it a poem, поэма, and the title page said so; the censor required the title to begin with the words Похождения Чичикова, the Adventures of Chichikov. It was the first volume of a larger design. Gogol burned the manuscript of the second volume in February 1852, days before his death; drafts of its chapters survived and were published in 1855.
Movement II
Manilov lives in sentiment without an object. His study holds a book that has lain open at the same page for two years; his projects stop at the dreaming of them; he has named his small sons Themistoclus and Alcides. When Chichikov asks for his dead souls, Manilov drops his pipe, searches his guest’s face for madness, and, assured that the thing is legal, gives them away for nothing, because he cannot refuse a friend. He is the gentlest of the five, and he is already quite empty.
Korobochka, a widow on a small estate whom Chichikov reaches by losing his way in a storm, hoards, and fears. She has never sold a dead soul and does not know what one fetches; she is afraid of selling too cheap, and she haggles over the dead as over hemp and lard. The narrator calls her “дубинноголовая”
(cudgel-headed). Her clocks wheeze before they strike. She gives in at last, and later drives into town to find out what dead souls are going for, which helps to undo him.
Nozdryov is energy without truth. He lies, gambles, cheats at draughts, boasts of dogs and horses, picks quarrels and makes them up, and is loved for it by everyone who has not yet been his victim. The narrator calls him “исторический человек”
(a historical man), because wherever he went there was an incident. He is made entirely of his speech, and the book does not give him a thought he does not say. When Chichikov leaves his house with nothing, and with his skin barely whole, he has left behind the one man in the province who cannot keep a secret.
Movement III
Sobakevich is a bear of a man, and his house is like him. The furniture is heavy and solid, and every chair and table seems to say “и я тоже Собакевич”
(I too am Sobakevich). He understands at once what Chichikov wants, names a high price, and praises his dead serfs as if they could still be put to work: the carriage-maker, the carpenter, the bootmaker, each the best of his trade. He haggles hard and writes out a list of them, with their trades and their qualities, in his own hand.
The sixth chapter opens with a digression on youth: once every new place was full of wonder to the narrator, and now he passes it coldly. Then Plyushkin’s estate, which is falling apart. Its overgrown garden is the one place in the book where decay is beautiful. In the house Chichikov cannot at first tell whether the figure before him is a man or a woman, a steward or a housekeeper; it is the master, a rich landowner who has let his granaries rot and keeps in one corner a heap of everything he has picked up from the roads. He is, the narrator says, “прореха на человечестве”
(a rent in humanity).
Once in the chapter something crosses his face. Chichikov mentions a name, and Plyushkin remembers a schoolfellow; for a moment there is a warmth in him, as when a drowning man shows on the surface; then it fades, and the face is as before. He sells his dead and his runaways, and offers his guest a stale cake brought by his daughter. It is the lowest of the five houses, and the descent is complete: each owner has been more like his things than the last, and the last has become one of them.
Movement IV
The seventh chapter begins with two kinds of writer. One chooses lofty characters and is praised; the other shows the trivial and shameful life everyone looks past, and is called low. The narrator has chosen the second, and will look at the world “сквозь видный миру смех и незримые, неведомые ему слезы”
(through laughter visible to the world and tears invisible and unknown to it). Then Chichikov sits down with Sobakevich’s list and reads it, and for the length of a reverie the dead come back: he imagines the carpenter, the bootmaker, the runaway, how each lived and how each died. The book gives them back their lives and then returns them to paper. The deeds are registered at the civil chamber, and the officials drink to the new landowner.
At the governor’s ball Chichikov is admired until Nozdryov arrives and asks him, before the room, how his trade in dead souls is going. In the next chapter two ladies, one simply agreeable and the other agreeable in every respect, turn the story into an abduction of the governor’s daughter, and the town divides into parties. No one knows what dead souls are for. The rumours multiply past need, and that is the town’s own life: a purchase made on paper becomes, by talk, everything a provincial town can imagine.
The officials confer. Chichikov may be a forger, or a spy, or Napoleon escaped from his island. The postmaster tells the Tale of Captain Kopeikin, a soldier crippled in the war of 1812 who goes to Petersburg to petition for help and is turned away by the offices of the state; it is the one place in the book where the cruelty of the state falls on the living, and it is told in a mannered, digressive voice. The censor would not let it stand as written, and Gogol rewrote it to soften it. Then the prosecutor goes home, sits down, and dies, and only then do the others discover that he had a soul.
Movement V
Chichikov finds himself refused at the governor’s door, and leaves the town. Only now is his history told: his childhood, his schooling, his patient and pleasant rise through the offices of the state, his falls and his recoveries, and the idea of the dead souls. The narrator says plainly that he has chosen a hero without virtue, because it is time to give the virtuous man a rest, and that a scoundrel is a fitting hero for what he has to show. The man of no qualities has had one quality all along: the art of pleasing.
Then the road. The britzka goes out at speed, and the narrator asks “и какой же русский не любит быстрой езды?”
(and what Russian does not love fast driving?). The carriage becomes a troika, and the troika becomes Rus itself, racing past everything, with the other peoples and states standing aside to let it pass: “Русь, куда ж несешься ты? дай ответ. Не дает ответа.”
(Rus, where are you rushing? Give an answer. She gives no answer.)
The volume ends where it began, with a carriage on the road. The britzka whose wheel the two peasants doubted in the first chapter is now the vehicle of the nation, and Chichikov is in it. Whether the exaltation of that page is the satirist turned prophet, or the satire’s last turn, the book does not say. Gogol meant the road to go on, through further volumes, toward a redemption he could not write; he burned what he had written of it, and the first volume stands alone, ending on a question that is not answered.
Act III · The Twelve
The itinerary passes the subtractive test. Each of the five landowners is a different relation to things: Manilov’s sentiment without an object, Korobochka’s hoarding fear, Nozdryov’s lying energy, Sobakevich’s solid greed, Plyushkin’s decay. Each bargain varies the one transaction, and take one away and the scale of the town’s dead is less. Chapter 7 gathers them on paper; chapters 8 to 10 are the reverse, the town turning a purchase into rumour. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what can go: the rumour chapters multiply versions past the point of need, and the Tale of Captain Kopeikin, though it is the one place the state’s cruelty to the living is shown, is set in a mannered frame the book does not need. And the scale is partly permitted rather than compelled: the volume is the first of a design never realised, and chapter 11 supplies at the end the history a plan required.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure is in the scheme itself. A society that counts persons as property on a census list has made the dead negotiable, and the book shows the paper economy that follows: souls bought, mortgaged and notarised. The living landowners are deader than their serfs. The one moment the souls become people is Chichikov’s reading of Sobakevich’s annotated list in chapter 7, when he imagines the carpenter, the bootmaker and the rest, their lives and deaths, and the book briefly gives them back. And Chichikov is disclosed as a type: a man of no qualities whose success is his pleasantness, who takes on the manner of each house he enters. This holds as a stated truth. Held where it is because Gogol refuses to state it: the narrator’s irony and the author’s own later religious reading leave the meaning partly in the grotesque, nearer mood than statement.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Elevation comes in the lyrical digressions and in flashes inside the comedy: the opening of chapter 6, on the youth that saw the world freshly and the age that sees it coldly; Plyushkin’s overgrown garden, the one place in the book where decay is beautiful; the flicker that crosses Plyushkin’s face at the name of a schoolfellow, and fades; the opening of chapter 7 on the writer who shows the world “сквозь видный миру смех и незримые, неведомые ему слезы”
(through laughter visible to the world and tears invisible and unknown to it). The last chapter ends at speed, with the troika and its question to Rus, and there is terror too, in Plyushkin’s room. Frequency is the limit: most of the book is comedy, and its height is reached in the margins of the action.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is in the title and it bears weight. A man goes from estate to estate buying souls, and the book makes the purchase a descent: each house is lower and more dead, and in the last Plyushkin is a man become “прореха на человечестве”
(a rent in humanity). The buyer of souls is not a Mephistopheles but a smooth collegiate councillor, and that is the point: the devil of this world is mediocre. Myth is built at the scale of the nation too, in the road and the troika, the land seen from a moving carriage. The particular stays particular throughout: a chest of drawers, a dish of sturgeon, a britzka. Held below the top because the infernal scheme, a descent that was to rise as through a purgatory, lives partly in the author’s plan rather than in the volume, and the five landowners are types more than myths.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the picaresque road novel of Lesage and Cervantes, the digressive narrator of Sterne and the mock epic of Fielding. The departure is large. Gogol called a prose satire a poem and meant it: the narrator’s epic similes grow past their occasion and live on their own, the black tailcoats at the governor’s party moving like flies on sugar in summer; the digressions turn from a scoundrel’s progress to the nation; and the grotesque, until then a manner of the tale, becomes the substance of a national epic. He chose a hero without virtue and said so in the last chapter. The stake was real and paid: the censor took the title and forced the Kopeikin tale to be rewritten, the critics divided sharply, and the work’s own demand for a continuation that would redeem it consumed its author.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The form is an inventory on a road, and it knows something no other form would. In a world where things have more life than people, the description of things is where the life is: Sobakevich’s furniture, every chair of which seems to say “и я тоже Собакевич”
(I too am Sobakevich), Plyushkin’s heap in the corner, Korobochka’s clocks. The census list is the book’s form in small: names, trades, deaths. The volume is a ring, opening on two peasants who debate whether the britzka’s wheel would reach Moscow and closing on the same carriage become the troika. Rewrite it as a straight satirical novel and the inflation of the similes, which is the knowledge, goes. Held a step down because the form is completed by a promise: the volume points beyond itself to a structure it does not contain.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence is a century and three quarters of incompatible readings, each of which holds. Belinsky read a social indictment. Gogol’s own Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847) claimed a moral and religious purpose, and Belinsky’s open letter of that year rejected it. Rozanov blamed the book for teaching Russia to despise itself; Merezhkovsky found the devil in its mediocrity; Andrei Bely studied the prose as a structure of sound and repetition (1934); Nabokov (1944) read it as a book about poshlost and about the secondary worlds born in its similes; Bakhtin read it as carnival. Each finds its evidence in the same eleven chapters. Held a step below the works whose yield is more than tonal and social, the great novels of consciousness.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is Russian literature of the 1840s. The force: with The Overcoat of the same year, this is where the Russian prose tradition turns, from Pushkin’s clarity to a grotesque realism of the provinces and the office, the line the critics then called the natural school and Chernyshevsky later named the Gogol period. It is held below the top because its reach outside Russian was slowed by its untranslatability, and the larger European redirection came from the novelists it made possible. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dostoevsky’s first novel was greeted as the work of a new Gogol; Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satire, Sologub’s The Petty Demon, Bely’s prose and Bulgakov stand in its line; Nabokov wrote a book on its author; and its landowners’ names became common nouns in Russian.
Score: 9.1 / 10
One hundred and eighty-four years. The text survives whole, the volume of 1842. Presence is continuous, and in Russia it is the widest a book can have: taught in every school, its landowners proverbial, adapted for stage and screen. Outside Russia it is read and taught in many translations, but less widely than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and that holds the axis a step below the widest presence. The surface fixed to its moment, serfdom and the census, has outlived its conditions: serfdom ended in 1861, and the book is read for the bureaucracy of persons that remains. The loss of the second volume is not a loss of this one, which its author published and let stand for ten years.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the Russian as far as it can be judged without the whole in hand; the sound of the whole is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. The construction of the five visits is exact: each house is its owner, each meal and each bargain varies the one transaction, and the dialogue of the bargaining is comedy of the first order, Korobochka afraid of selling too cheap, Sobakevich praising his dead as craftsmen. The narrator’s sentence, with its digressions inside digressions and its catalogues, is controlled even when it pretends to lose itself. Nozdryov, “исторический человек”
(a historical man), because there was always an incident wherever he went, is made from speech alone. Charged: the town chapters lose some tension, the postmaster’s manner in the Kopeikin tale is long for its effect, and the biography in chapter 11 is late exposition.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Korobochka, “дубинноголовая”
(cudgel-headed), haggling over dead souls as over hemp and lard, and the closing apostrophe, “Русь, куда ж несешься ты? дай ответ. Не дает ответа.”
(Rus, where are you rushing? Give an answer. She gives no answer.) Does one law govern both? The narrator’s voice, hyperbolic and wandering, covers both, and the troika rises out of Chichikov’s own britzka, so that the exaltation rides on the scoundrel. Many hear one physics there; many hear a break, the satirist turned prophet. Both hearings are in the text, and the work does not settle between them. The biography of chapter 11 also shifts the register. Held where it is for that unresolved seam across a wide range.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: labour and the estate economy, from Korobochka’s hemp to Plyushkin’s rotting stores; serfdom as law and as census; the state in its offices, the civil chamber, the governor, the chief of police, the Board of Trustees; history, in 1812 through Kopeikin and in the rumour that Chichikov is Napoleon; society, at the ball and in the ladies’ gossip; the family, in Manilov’s sons named Themistoclus and Alcides; the nation, on the road; the natural order, in Plyushkin’s garden. They are integrated by the itinerary, which carries one man through all of them. The limits are consciousness, kept thin by design until chapter 11, and the sacred, named in the title and deferred to volumes that do not exist.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2, then Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.1. Five visits built exactly, each house its owner and each bargain a variation on one transaction, under a narrator’s sentence controlled even when it pretends to lose itself; the turn of Russian prose from Pushkin’s clarity to the grotesque realism of the provinces and the office; and a text whole for a hundred and eighty-four years, read for the bureaucracy of persons that has outlived serfdom.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3, held by the rumour chapters, which multiply versions past need, by the mannered frame of the Kopeikin tale, and by a scale partly permitted by a design never realised, with the hero’s history supplied at the end. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.6: the troika rises out of the scoundrel’s britzka, but whether the satirist and the prophet obey one law the work does not settle.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Swerve at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the nearest by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.7. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Nikolai Gogol’s Мертвые души (Myortvye dushi), the first volume, published in Moscow in 1842 in eleven chapters, under the title the censor imposed, Похождения Чичикова, или Мертвые души (The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls), with Gogol’s own designation, a poem, on the title page. It is scored as that volume. The drafts of the second volume, which survived the burning of its manuscript in February 1852 and were published in 1855, show where Gogol meant the work to go; they are context only, and are neither credited nor charged. Every score is judged on the book in Gogol’s Russian, which is not in hand. Russian is quoted on this page only where its words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation. Translation · Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s (1996) is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense, with Bernard Guilbert Guerney’s (1942) for comparison. Neither is in hand, neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged to the book. The structure, the scenes, the bargains and the digressions are judged in full; the sound of Gogol’s Russian is known here in its famous passages and not as a whole, and beyond them it is neither credited nor charged. Names follow the usual English forms. Citations are by chapter. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the volume, the later history of the text of the Kopeikin tale, the origin of the anecdote behind the book, Herzen’s response to it and the date of its first stage adaptation, are not given.