Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

24 May 2019, 21:00
A source: © jnsm.com.ua
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The plot of "Dead Souls" Gogol prompted the poet Alexander Pushkin, who heard it at one time, while in exile in Bessarabia - in the town of Bender were massive cases where serfs who fled here from other regions of Russia to hide from the police took their names dead, and for a long time in Bender officially not registered deaths.

In Gogol's novel, this story was transformed into the adventures of the main character Chichikov, a former corrupt customs officer who, hiding from persecution, comes to a provincial town and in order to give himself status he buys dead peasants from local landowners who were still alive.

Gogol began writing Dead Souls in the fall of 1835, on March 9, 1842, he received censor's permission to publish it. May 21, 1842 "The Adventures of Chichikov, or the Dead Souls" were published in Moscow.
Photo © jnsm.com.ua

Two years earlier, Gogol began writing the second volume of the trilogy and finished it in November 1843. Under unclear circumstances, in July 1845, Gogol burned the second volume and all drafts for it. Only after the writer's death in 1852 in his archive were found four sections in an incomplete draft, issued in the summer of 1855.

At the end of the twentieth century, copies of the first five chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls, copied by hand, were discovered. The third volume was never written.

During the life of Nikolai Gogol, the novel Dead Souls was translated into many languages, with the development of cinema it was repeatedly screened (first time in 1909), adapted for drama and opera productions.
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