ABSTRACT
Gogol’s whole aim is to generalize: the little provincial town NN to which Chichikov goes on his peculiar mission is exactly like all other provincial towns, just as the brichka in which Chichikov travels can be categorized with precision: it is a bachelor’s vehicle, used by such people as ‘retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, landowners possessing about one hundred peasant souls, in a word, all those who are called middling gentry’. In Dead Souls they recognized something of the highest originality, a work ‘incomparably national’. Gogol had already delighted them with his language, so fresh and sly and various; ‘all the young people began to speak Gogol’s idiom’; and now from Dead Souls they received a whole lexicon of winged words, apt and mocking. Dead Souls was rightly called by the author a ‘poem’, for it cannot be translated without losing much.
