Dead Souls
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Dead Souls is a socially critical black comedy. Set in Russia before the emancipation of serfs in 1861, the "dead souls" are dead serfs still being counted by landowners as property, as well as referring to the landowners' morality. Through surreal and often dark comedy, Gogol criticizes Russian society after the Napoleonic Wars. He intended to also offer solutions to the problems he satirized, but died before he ever completed the second part of what was intended to be a trilogy. The work famously ends mid-sentence.
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The cut-off came at the perfect time. I was going towards 4.5 stars in the last 50 pages for a variety of reasons but if you really, and I mean REALLY, understood what Gogol was intending in this book, even if the cut-off was not intended, you would know why this is a perfect end.
I feel this is the end of an era. I absolutely left a part of my heart in this book.
(There is a re-imagined continuation with 60 pages written 5 years after Gogol's death in my copy. It is not available in other translations I have seen. I am not usually into these kind of things. I considered the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series to have ended with Douglas Adams life and I fear ruining the magic this book has on me right now by reading the continuation in someone else's pen, which I also feel would be irrelevant. I think it ended where it should have unless Gogol himself have imagined it differently. I might go back in a few years and read that final chapter. But for now, for me, Chichikov's story is satisfactory in how I understood the author to have intended the manuscript to come across).
This book has taken a duplex apartment in my head, rent free.
