CHAPTER LXXXII

DEAD SOULS

The poet who taught the Russian people the possibilities of their language was Pushkin; one of those beautiful leisure-class youths who live fast and die young. He was born of an aristocratic family, and when he was twenty he was, like most poets, a hopeful idealist, and wrote an ode to liberty, and was condemned to exile. He lived a wild life among the gypsies, and wasted himself, and finally his family persuaded the tsar to give him another chance. He was brought back to court and made a small functionary, among illiterate, dull, supposed-to-be-great people who had no understanding of his talents. He married a beautiful noble lady, who betrayed him continuously and broke his heart.

Pushkin now wrote folk tales, and a great quantity of love poems in the Byronic manner. His idealism was dead; he was a court man, and went so far as to glorify the rape of Poland. He wrote a long narrative poem, “Eugene Onegin,” which tells about the tragic love troubles of an aristocratic youth, together with all the details of his life, how he got up in the morning, how he sipped his chocolate, how he read his invitations to tea-parties and balls. You might not think there would be great literature in such a story; but at least Pushkin dealt with Russian themes and with reality; he made it interesting, lending it the glamour of musical verse, and so he killed the old classical tradition in Russia. The Greek nymphs and the French shepherdesses went out of fashion, and the way was clear for Russian writers with something important to say to their people.

Then came Nikolai Gogol. He was a Little Russian; that is, he came from the Ukraine, which is in the South, and like all Southern countries is supposed to be warm-hearted and romantic. Gogol was a poor devil of a clerk, who leaped to fame by writing humorous tales, in which the laughter was mingled with tears. He did not put in any recognized “propaganda,” for the simple reason, that this would have cost him his liberty. In those days when you were discussing politics you announced yourself as a Hegelian Moderate or a Hegelian Leftist, or whatever it might be; in other words, you pretended to be discussing the ideas of a German philosopher, a spinner of metaphysical cobwebs, instead of dealing with the real problems of your country and time.

Gogol wrote a play called “The Inspector-General,” which tells how a government representative is expected to visit a small provincial town, and all the functionaries are in a state of terror for fear their various stealings will be exposed. It is understood that the inspector-general will come in disguise, and so they mistake a youthful traveler for this functionary, and insist on doing him honor, to his great bewilderment. Finally the postmaster of the town, following his custom of secretly reading the mail, opens a letter from the young man to a friend, telling about his adventures and ridiculing the town functionaries. The postmaster reads this aloud in the hearing of the functionaries, to their great dismay.

Somebody read this play to the tsar, and he was so delighted that he ordered it produced. You remember King Louis of France, the “grand monarch,” taking delight in Moliere’s ridicule of his courtiers. The monarch can afford to laugh, or at least thinks he can; it is only the functionaries who realize the destructive power of laughter.

Then Gogol wrote a long novel, “Dead Souls.” He introduces us to a young man who might be a graduate of any one of a thousand schools and colleges and universities of “salesmanship” in the United States. So brilliant are this young man’s talents:

Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses; if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also Tchitchikov would make remarks to the point. If the conversation related to some investigation which was being made by the government, he would show that he also knew something about the tricks of the civil service functionaries. When the talk was about billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy, he knew all about brandy.

This expert in the psychology of salesmanship had a truly Yankee idea to make his fortune. At that time the Russian peasants were sold with the land, and the landlord had to pay taxes on all his serfs. A reckoning was made at certain periods, and if any serfs died in between the periods of reckoning, the landlord had to pay taxes just the same. Now, said the salesman to himself, any landlord will be glad to sell me these “dead souls”; and when I have bought a great number of them, I will get hold of a piece of land, and move all these “dead souls” to that land, and some bank will lend me a great sum of money, not knowing they are dead.

To travel over Russia and interview landlords on such an errand is in itself high comedy. Gogol takes us to one estate after another, and lets us see the misery of the serfs, and the incompetence and futility of the landlords; the ones who are kind-hearted and sentimental don’t know what to do, and cause just as much misery as the brutal ones. Such a situation requires no comment from the novelist; merely to know about it is to condemn it. So it happened that Gogol’s story became a revolutionary document, and was copied out by hand and passed about among the young rebels. The government intervened, preventing a second edition of the book; and poor Gogol, a little later in his life, turned into some kind of religious maniac, and repented of what he had written, and burned great quantities of his manuscripts, including the latter part of this novel. That gives us a glimpse of the “Russian soul,” and makes us realize what a distance these people had to travel from Oriental barbarism to modern individualism.

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