Dead souls, a great Dante poem in nineteenth-century Russia

Nikolai Vasil'evič Gogol '(1809-1852) is considered the father of the great Russian literature of the nineteenth century. "Poet of the real", as he was already defined by his contemporaries, in his stories and novels he is a master in describing the society of his time with tones that are sometimes ironic, sometimes disenchanted, grotesque or dramatic, a static, hypocritical society crossed by profound inequalities . Gogol's great dream, however, was to give life to a great poem directly inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, but which would tell the Russia of the early nineteenth century, the one that the great writer saw flowing before his eyes. Thus, in the Gogolian poem in the first part, in which the misery experienced by many in the present was told, a second one had to follow where man could be saved thanks to love of neighbor and a third where good would have triumphed. In short, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, even if immersed in a reality very different from Dante's one.

The great project never came to fruition and Gogol 'managed to publish only the first part of his work in 1842, a first part which is however one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time. Let's talk about Dead Souls, now available in audiobook (Emons, 2021, Euro 16.90. Also downloadable in Mp3) in the splendid reading by actress Anna Bonaiuto. In Dead Souls a surreal and grotesque story is told, but at the same time by no means impossible in Tsarist Russia. An obscure official, Pavel Ivanovič Čičikov, in fact, elaborates a roguish plan to raise his social status. He decides to go to an obscure province of the great Russian empire and to buy from some nobles and landowners at low cost "dead souls", that is the serfs who died after the last census and still considered alive for tax purposes until the next census control. Aristocrats and the like are happy to give up the "souls" of their servants so as to pay less taxes while Čičikov can rightfully claim, complete with signed and countersigned documents, that he has many people in his employ - even if dead and buried - which can allow him to be considered an important character and obtain lands on favorable terms.

The plot of Gogol's work is enough to make us understand Gogol's genius in mocking the social structures and norms of his time and the nonsense of the Russian bureaucracy. However, the book strikes above all for the incredible roundup of Čičikov's encounters with characters unforgettable in their meanness, narrow-mindedness, nonsense: aristocrats and "heavy" people who prove so used to total apathy and "doing nothing" to be totally alien to any kind of reality. This extraneousness leads them to consider it absolutely normal for an official to go and ask to be able to buy property rights on peasants who no longer exist. And the same extraneousness leads them to consider the mass of people in their service as mere instruments of their well-being.

Gogol's is therefore a very ferocious satire of a world in which inequality and exploitation were the rule, a satire that unfolds, in the manner of Dante, from infernal circle to circle showing all the worst vices of the human being: the debauchery, sloth, greed and every other narrow-mindedness.

In short, Dead Souls is a journey into the darkest labyrinths of man and the revelation of all the pain that can go through human existence. "How sad our Russia is!" Pushkin exclaimed when Gogol 'read the first pages of the work to him and it is difficult to blame him. However, hope is suggested by the author himself in the pages of the book, when he repeatedly invites the reader not to consider himself so much superior to Čičikov, not to consider him alien to humanity or worse still inhumane. Čičikov speaks to us and strikes us because it tells a part of us and of our limitation. So we must not be afraid of this dark side if we want to proceed on our journey, leave Hell, cross Purgatory and find Heaven: "You fear the gaze that searches deeply, you yourselves are afraid to take a deep look at something , you love to touch everything with distracted eyes. (...) And those of you, full of Christian humility, not aloud but in silence, in solitude, in the moments of solitary conversations with yourself, will sink into the interior of your soul a serious question: "But there is no is it perhaps, also in me, some part of Čičikov? " not by chance writes Gogol 'and it is a clear invitation to make ourselves an examination of conscience before judging others or, worse, and put ourselves on a pedestal.