Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

I expected this to be a gloomy book. I took one look at that title and I thought "This will be all Russian morality and crime and punishment. Perfect."

Turns out that Nikolai Gogol is Russia's Douglas Adams. We're talking like ridiculously silly comments here. I tried to find some examples on Wikiquote, having returned the book to the library. Just funny little asides about this character or that one looking like a goat's momma or something like that. It was wonderful.

The story itself, though, was some good hearty moral stuff, which I always appreciate. The basic premise was something like "There's no point in me (the author) making up some perfect hero who is brave and kind and wonderful in every way. We are all sick to death of that. Instead I will draw the hero that I know, that I have met a thousand times in a hundred different cities. You will know him too, because he is so like your neighbour or your cousin or even yourself".  So the hero is this fellow of questionable moral fiber, who acts exactly like every intelligent, popular person in Russia would have hoped to be acting at that time. And the hero's sins catch up with him, but it's difficult to condemn him, even though you may not like him, because makes exactly the decision each of us readers would have in any situation. I think Gogol is poking fun at the intensely moralistic society which he was surrounded by (for examples of moralist Russian writing, read Fyodor Dostoyevsky). He was trying to get everyone to look their inner devils in the eye, and laugh at them a bit so they would seem so awful. He seriously felt the squalidness of his homeland, and the meanness that people visited on each other, and tried to polish it up with a couple jokes so that people would actually look at these things for what they were.

Anyway, I liked the thing a lot. Elegant and witty and lightly informative.

Up next: The Allegory of Love by C. S. Lewis. It's an academic work on the sudden appearance of a new formula in medieval literature: "happiness grounded on successful romantic love - which still supplies the motive of our popular fiction". I am looking forward to this immensely.


To close, I give you a little quote from Gogol: "As it is so strangely ordained in this world, what is amusing will turn into being gloomy, if you stand too long before it, and then God knows what ideas may not stray into the mind... Why is it that even in moments of unthinking, careless gaiety a different and strange mood comes upon one?"