Dead Souls: A Novel

by Nikolai Gogol

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  * Thus in the manuscript; it should be Vassilyevich.—TRANS.

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  * That is, Tentetnikov, called Derpennikov in Gogol’s early drafts.—TRANS.

  * Part of the manuscript is missing. The text continues on a new page, in midsentence.—TRANS.

  * The phrase is unfinished in the manuscript.—TRANS.

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  Notes

  VOLUME ONE

  1. The city of Tula, some hundred miles south of Moscow, most famous for its gunsmiths—immortalized by Nikolai Leskov (1831–95) in his Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea—was also known for samovars and gingerbread.

  2. August von Kotzebue (1761–1819) was a German playwright who lived for some years in Russia, where his plays were very successful. Suspected (rightly) of being an agent of the tsar, he was stabbed to death in the theater by a German student named Sand. Cora and Rolla are characters in his plays The Sun Maiden and The Spanish in Peru, or the Death of Rolla.

  3. The Order of St. Anna (i.e., St. Anne, mother of the Virgin) had two degrees, one worn on the neck, the other on the breast. The star was the decoration of the Order of St. Stanislas, a Polish civil order founded in 1792, which began to be awarded in Russia in 1831.

  4. A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee. The practice was obviously open to abuse, and it was abolished by the reforms of the emperor Alexander II in the 1860s.

  5. Russians sometimes affected the uvular French r when speaking their own language, thinking it a sign of gentility.

  6. The Son of the Fatherland was a reactionary political and literary review published in Petersburg between 1812 and 1852.

  7. Pavel Petrovich is the emperor Paul I (1754–1801), son of Peter III (1728–62), whose life was cut short by the machinations of his wife, who thus became the empress Catherine II, called the Great (1729–96). Paul I also came to an untimely end, at the hands of conspirators headed by Count Pahlen. Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov (1745–1813), prince of Smolensk, after losing to Napoleon at the battle of Austerlitz in 1805, successfully led the defense of Russia against the French invasion of 1812.

  8. The six-week Advent fast leading up to Christmas is sometimes called St. Philip’s fast, because it begins on the day after the saint’s feast day (November 14).

  9. Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), close to the German border in what is now the Czech Republic, is known for its salutary hot springs. The Caucasus also has hot springs, mineral waters, and mountain air.

  10. Clicquot is the name of one of the finest champagnes. Nozdryov uses it in lowercase as an adjective, and combines it superlatively but absurdly with matradura, the name of an old Russian dance. Plebeian kvass is made from fermented rye bread and malt.

  11. A balyk is made from a special dorsal section of flesh running the entire length of a salmon or sturgeon, which is removed in one piece and either salted or smoked. It is especially fancied in Russia.

  12. Opodeldoc (originally oppodeltoch) was the name given by the Swiss alchemist and physician Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus (1493–1541), to various medicinal plasters; it is now applied to soap liniments mixed with alcohol and camphor. Nozdryov applies it to Chichikov in a far-fetched pun on delo, the Russian word for “deal.” Hence our spelling.

  13. Fenardi was an actual street acrobat and conjurer, well known in the 1820s.

  14. Sophron is a Greek common noun meaning a wise, sensible, intelligent person.

  15. The popular French song “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” expressed the pleasure the French took in the misfortunes of John Churchill, duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), who led the English forces in the War of the Spanish Succession in the Low Countries. The duke’s name is variously misspelled in French transcriptions as “Malbrough,” “Malborough,” and even “Malbrouk.”

  16. Nozdryov probably means haut sauternes, a nonexistent variety of the great sweet white wines of Bordeaux.

  17. Alexander Suvorov (1729–1800), the greatest Russian general of his time, successfully led Russian forces against the Turks at Izmayil, put down the Polish insurrection in 1794, and led the opposition to the French revolutionary armies until he was stopped by Maréchal Masséna at Zürich in 1799.

  18. Colonies of soldier-farmers were first created by the emperor Alexander I (1777–1825), and were placed mainly in Ukraine. The empress Catherine II began the inviting of German settlers to Russia, particularly to the province of Saratov.

  19. Mikhailo, or Mikhail—Misha or Mishka in the diminutive—is the common Russian name for a bear.

  20. Alexander Mavrocordato (1791–1865), a Greek statesman born in Constantinople, and the admirals Andreas Vokos Miaoulis (1768–1835) and Constantine Canaris (1790–1877) all distinguished themselves in the Greek war of independence (1821–28). Bobelina, an Albanian woman, outfitted three ships at her own expense and fought on the Greek side in the same war. Prince Pyotr Bagration (1765–1812), a Russian general born in Georgia, was a leader of the opposition to Napoleon’s invasion and was mortally wounded at the battle of Borodino.

  21. In Ezekiel (38:2, 3, 18; 39:11, 15) Gog is named as prince of Meshech and Tubal, in some unclear relation with “the land of Magog.” In Revelation (20:8) Gog and Magog are called “the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth.” But in the popular mind, the rhyming names suggest two evil monsters.

  22. Russians (and others) have a custom of making the sign of the cross over their mouths when they yawn, to keep evil spirits from flying in.

  23. Koshchey the Deathless is a wicked character from Russian folktales. The hero of the tales must cross the sea, come to an island, find an oak tree, dig up a chest under the oak tree, find in the chest a hare, in the hare a duck, in the duck an egg, and in the egg a needle. When the hero breaks off the point of the needle, Koshchey dies.

  24. Theodoros Colocotronis (1770–1843), a Greek general, was another hero of the Greek war of independence.

  25. The line “caw itself away at the top of its crow’s voice” flew here from the fable The Crow and the Fox, by Ivan Krylov (1769–1844). It is proverbial in Russia.

  26. Napoleon, at the head of a 500,000-man army, invaded Russia in 1812. At the end of the same year, he managed to retreat with only a few thousand troops. Later in Dead Souls these events will be referred to simply as “the year ’twelve.”

  27. Rus was the old name for Russia, before Rossiya came into use in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Rus began to be used again, especially in romantic apostrophes to the fatherland. It is in this sense, or in an ironic parody of it, that Gogol uses the word.

  28. A kulich is a rich, sweet yeast bread, generally cylindrical in form, baked especially for Easter.

  29. The different denominations of Russian banknotes were given different colors; red was the color of the ten-rouble bill.

  30. Johann Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), German romantic idealist poet and playwright, profoundly influenced Russian literature and thought in the early nineteenth century.

  31. A zertsalo was a small three-faced glass pyramid bearing an eagle and certain edicts of the emperor Peter the Great (1682–1725), which stood on the desk in every government office.

  32. The “Komarinsky” is a Russian dance song with rather racy words, which Gogol replaces here with the Russian equivalent of “blankety-blank.”

  33. Werther and Charlotte are characters from The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). What Chichikov recites, however, is not from that novel (written in prose), but from a poem by the forgotten Russian poet Vassily Tumansky (1800–60) entitled Werther to Charlotte (an Hour Before His Death).


  34. The English pedagogue Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) established a monitorial system of education in which a master taught the best pupils, who then taught others.

  35. A play on Sprechen sie Deutsch? (“Do you speak German?”), which in Russian pronunciation rhymes with the postmaster’s patronymic.

  36. Vassily I. Zhukovsky (1783–1852), poet and translator, was a friend of Pushkin and of Gogol; his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was an inspiration to Gogol in the writing of Dead Souls. The poem Lyudmila, an adaptation of Lenore by the German poet Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94), was published in 1808, and was “a not-yet-faded novelty” only in such places as the town of N.

  37. Edward Young (1683–1765) was an English poet who was a precursor of the romantics; his Night Thoughts were translated into Russian in 1780. Karl Eckartshausen (1752–1803), a German mystical writer, published his Key in 1791.

  38. Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) was already well-known for his sentimental tales and travel writing when he published his great history of Russia, on which his reputation now stands. The Moscow Gazette was a conservative daily newspaper subsidized by the government.

  39. A “kiss” in this case is an airy, sweet meringue.

  40. Baiser, French for “kiss,” is russified by Nozdryov, who then makes a diminutive of it, bezeshka, our “bitsy baiser.”

  41. A kalatch (pl. kalatchi) is a very fine white bread shaped like a purse with a looped handle.

  42. The naming of the church is an absurd development along the lines of St. Martin’s in the Fields or St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie: nedotychki means “bunglers” or “botchers”; it may, by some stretch of the imagination, be a topographical name—Bungler’s Hill, or Botcher’s Lane.

  43. A phonetic transcription of mispronounced French, meaning: ce qu’on appelle histoire (“what’s known as a story, or scandal”). There will be other such transcriptions in what follows: “orerr” for horreur, “scandaleusities,” and the postmaster’s “finzerb” for fines herbes, the minced dried herbs used in cooking, which he apparently thinks is the name of some dish.

  44. Rinaldo Rinaldini, an Italian brigand, is the eponymous hero of a novel by the German writer Christian August Vulpius (1762–1827), which had a resounding success throughout Europe and created the type of the Italian brigand in literature. Vulpius was Goethe’s brother-in-law.

  45. Commérages is French for the gossip spread by commères, inquisitive, chatty women.

  46. The original Vauxhall was a seventeenth-century pleasure garden in London. Russian adopted the name as a common noun referring to an outdoor space for concerts and entertainment, with teahouse, tables, and so on.

  47. Kopeikin is the name of a robber in folklore; it derives from kopeika, the hundredth part of a rouble, anglicized as “kopeck.” Gogol offered to change the name if his publisher ran into trouble from the censors.

  48. Semiramis, legendary queen of Assyria and Babylonia, is credited with founding the city of Babylon, famous for its hanging gardens, which were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

  49. Revel, or Reval, now Tallinn, is the capital city of Estonia. A Revel inn—that is, an inn run by Estonians—implies inexpensiveness and simplicity.

  50. Moscow and Petersburg are commonly referred to as the “two capitals” of Russia.

  51. The number 666, corresponding to the name of the beast in Revelation (13:18), signifies the Antichrist. The vogue of mysticism followed the predilections of the emperor Alexander I in the later years of his reign.

  52. The Russian terms for the godmother and godfather of the same person, in relation to each other, are kum and kuma (pronounced “kooMAH”). The canons of the Orthodox Church forbid them to marry.

  53. The reference is in all likelihood to the novel entitled The Duchess de La Vallière (referred to in volume 2, chapter 3 of Dead Souls as The Countess La Vallière), the work of the French writer Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830), who was teacher of the children of the duke of Orléans. It may also be to a work of the duchess de La Vallière herself, Louise de La Baume Le Blanc (1644–1710), once a favorite of Louis XIV, who ended her life as a Carmelite nun and wrote pious reflections on her sinful past.

  54. In the Orthodox marriage service, the best men hold crowns over the heads of the couple, symbolic of martyrdom as a witnessing to the Kingdom of God.

  55. Gogol was living in Italy when he wrote Dead Souls, and here, from his “beautiful distance,” compares the landscapes of Italy and Russia.

  56. Solon (630?–560? B.C.), the lawgiver of Athens, was one of the seven sages of Greece. The quotation is from Krylov’s fable The Musicians.

  57. The Orthodox Church does not celebrate marriages during the Great Lent, the forty-day fast preceding Holy Week and Easter.

  58. A euphemism for bribes. Prince Alexander N. Khovansky (1771–1857) was director of the state bank from 1818 until his death; his signature was reproduced on all state banknotes. Ironically, the name Khovansky comes from the Ukrainian word khovat, meaning “to hide” or “to secret away.”

  59. Cantonists were the children of soldiers, who were assigned to the department of the army from birth and educated at state expense in special schools.

  VOLUME TWO

  1. Petukh is Russian for “rooster”; moreover, Petya, the diminutive of Pyotr, is the common name for a rooster. Pyotr Petrovich Petukh is thus a rooster not only backwards and forwards but three times over.

  2. A Greek name, which Gogol finally settled on after using the odd hybrids Skudronzhoglo and Gobrozhoglo in earlier redactions. Although this character represents Gogol’s attempt to portray the ideal landowner, uniting the best qualities of two great Orthodox nations, he seems to have been at pains to give him a name that has a particularly ugly sound in Russian.

  3. A sibirka is a short caftan with a fitted waist and gathered skirts, often trimmed with fur, having a seamless back, small buttons or clasps in front, and a short standing collar.

  4. Kostanzhoglo paraphrases Genesis 3:19, which reads: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Revised Standard Version).

  5. Krylov’s fable Trishka’s Caftan, describing the patching process that Gogol uses metaphorically here, became proverbial in Russia.

  6. A molieben (pronounced “molYEHben”) is an Orthodox prayer service for any occasion, from the blessing of a new beehive to petitioning for a sick person’s recovery.

  7. There is a Russian custom of commemorating the dead on the Tuesday after St. Thomas’s Sunday (the first Sunday after Easter). The celebration is called Krasnaya Gorka (“Pretty Hill”), probably because the graves (little hills) are prettily decorated for the occasion. The accompanying festivities required more space than a village cemetery would afford.

  8. Navarino, or Pylos, is a Greek port in the southwest Peloponnesus on the Ionian Sea where, in 1827, the joint naval forces of Russia, England, and France destroyed the Turkish fleet.

  9. The Old Believers, called Raskolniki (“schismatics”) in Russian, split off from the Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century, in disagreement with reforms carried out by the patriarch Nikon. Some sects of the Old Believers refused obedience to the civil authorities, claiming that they, like the Church, were under the sway of the Antichrist.

  10. Voronoy-Dryannoy is a highly implausible last name combining “raven-black” and “trashy.”