Dead Souls

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• Publisher: Alma Classics
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780714548227
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town and proceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual and somewhat macabre proposition. He offers to buy the rights to the dead serfs who are still registered on the landowner's estate, thus reducing their liability for taxes. It is not clear what Chichikov's intentions are with the dead serfs he is purchasing, and despite his attempts to ingratiate himself, his strange behaviour arouses the suspicions of everyone in the town.A biting satire of social pretensions and pomposity, Dead Souls has been revered since its original publication in 1842 as one of the funniest and most brilliant novels of nineteenth-century Russia. Its unflinching and remorseless depiction of venality in Russian society is a lasting tribute to Gogol's comic genius.

Introduction

I have managed to translate this book, but I am apprehensive: the fact is, once a book has been translated, translating it again is a great sin, because the second translation will appear to be a hostile act against the first.

– Dachi (c.900 AD), Georgian monk

This is probably the thirteenth translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls into English. On the whole, each successive translation has been more professional and accurate, so that in my recent predecessors I could detect only half a dozen mistakes and a couple of omitted lines (oddly enough, in the two most recent versions these occur in the same place). Nevertheless, rather than revise an existing translation, there seemed to be good reason to undertake a totally new one. Firstly, because even greater accuracy can be achieved: total accuracy is probably impossible. Gogol was a great collector of new and arcane words, and even though his notebooks record the meaning, he was notoriously uninterested in accuracy, and never made systematic enquiries, so that what a word actually means may contradict what Gogol thought it meant, and the translator probably has to settle for the latter meaning. (Russian commentators differ in their interpretations, but I have, other factors being equal, usually adopted those offered by V.A. Voropayev and I.A. Vinogradov in their 1994 edition of Gogol’s collected works, published by Russkaya Kniga.)

The second justification for translating Dead Souls again is that a much fuller text needs to be presented to the English-speaking reader. The unfinished (or half-destroyed) Part Two, for instance, has usually been translated from the second version that Gogol produced. Russian readers are usually given both the first and the second versions, which are ninety per cent identical. The first version, however, does have two or three magnificent episodes which Gogol discarded: Chichikov’s anecdote, “Love us when we’re nasty; anyone would love us when we’re nice”, and Chichikov’s consultation with a lawyer are too superb, in my view, to omit. This version therefore attempts a synoptic version of Part Two, basing the translation on the second version, but incorporating passages from the first whenever the loss seems serious. The situation is somewhat like that of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, where religious feelings, as well as artistic maturity, drove the author to revise, and sometimes spoil, a more youthful version. Recent editorial and archival work in Russia has brought to light a number of passages which Gogol intended to add to a final edition of the work: one of them (the conversation of the town’s officials with Korobochka and Sobakevich) would be fit to incorporate into Part One, but for the disruption this would cause to the flow of the existing narrative.

Other factors have played a role in my approach to translation. Gogol’s Russian text is ideal for theatrical recitation, and I have tried to ensure that in English, too, the sentences, however long, can be spoken aloud, without getting out of breath. One minor factor affecting this translation is that it was first printed in the 2008 Garnett Press edition of Dead Souls, a large-format hardback edition which incorporates reproductions not just of the ninety-six engravings by Chagall in the French Thériade edition of 1947, but the ornamental dropped capitals that begin each of the first eleven chapters. To preserve these initial letters, I have had to play with the opening sentence to ensure that it begins with the same letter as the French translation which Chagall was commissioned to illustrate. Usually, this involved little effort; once or twice a whole sentence had to be recast.

Not only by his prodigious fantasy and his combination of the real and the surreal did Chagall prove to be the ideal illustrator: his background, the town of Vitebsk, proved, as he remembered it, to be uncannily suited to Gogol’s unnamed town of N— All that we are told of N— is that it is equidistant from St Petersburg and Moscow. Vitebsk happens to be one of two towns that qualify geographically; moreover, we know that Gogol was once stranded there for a night, the sort of incident often indelible from an author’s imagination.

This is not the place for an essay on Gogol’s life or on the genesis and meaning of Dead Souls. As far as biographies and critical studies in English go, the reader is spoilt for choice: I suggest (in descending order of personal preference) that readers seek out monographs by Vladimir Nabokov, V.V. Gippius, Vsevolod Setchkarev, Henry Troyat, Victor Erlich, David Magarshack, Charles Edward Turner, Janko Lavrin and Ernest Dupuy. My personal contribution to their disquisitions is that, after teaching Gogol to students for forty years and visiting Russia over an even longer period, I have progressed (or regressed) from the prevailing academic view of Gogol as a phantasmagorist, even an idiot savant, creating, like Kafka, a parallel world from a reality he sees without logical understanding, closer to the view of the naive Russian “realists” of over a hundred years ago: that Gogol sees very clearly and represents, with no more distortion than art requires, the same Russia that astounded the Marquis de Custine and frustrated or bewitched other travellers, a Russia still recognizable today. An encounter with Russian customs will convince any traveller that Chichikov really did begin his career in the Customs Service, and any traffic policemen will observe an etiquette of bribery identical to Chichikov’s registering his purchases of dead souls.

I might also add that Part Two is neither as incomplete nor as uneven as the critical consensus asserts. The content of the missing chapters (between chapter 4 and the final, or near-final, chapter) can be inferred from that last chapter – and, if there are failures (such as Gogol’s paralysis when faced with the task of describing the uncompromising self-sacrificing heroine Ulinka, a type that was waiting to be turned by Turgenev and Dostoevsky into a role model for Russian womanhood), they are few and far between and of little significance compared with the brilliance of the setting (the south of the Ukraine) and the wonderfully evoked and now likable characters of General Betrishchev, Platonov and Petukh, let alone the subtle development in Chichikov himself. Part Two, in any case, contains in embryonic form most major Russian fiction of the rest of the nineteenth century – Goncharov’s Oblomov, Turgenev’s Rudin, Dostoevsky’s penitent criminals and Tolstoy’s heart-searching landowners. For that reason alone, it deserves rehabilitating.

For the difficult work of photographic reproduction I am immensely grateful to Anna Pilkington and Robert Rayfield. Anna Pilkington also thoroughly compared this translation with the original and corrected a number of omissions, blunders and infelicities.

– Donald Rayfield

Dead Souls
An Epic Poem

PART ONE

Chapter One

Lieutenant colonels in retirement, staff captains, landowners with about a hundred serfs, bachelors – in a nutshell, anyone classed as middling gentry – tend to drive vehicles like the rather fine small barouche* that drove through the gates of the hotel in the town of N—, a provincial capital. The gentleman in the barouche was no Apollo, neither was he ugly: he was neither fat nor thin. He couldn’t be called old, yet he wasn’t young, either. His arrival created no stir in the town and was not marked by any particular event; but two Russian peasants standing by the doors of the tavern opposite the hotel did make a few remarks which referred to the carriage rather than to its passenger. “Look at that,” one said to the other, “what a pair of wheels! What do you think, would it get to Moscow, if it had to, or wouldn’t it?” – “It would,” replied the other. – “But I don’t think it would get as far as Kazan,* would it?” – “Not to Kazan,” replied the other. At that the conversation ended. However, when the barouche drove up to the hotel, it crossed the path of a young man wearing very tight and short white linen trousers, a frock coat which was meant to be fashionable, revealing a shirt front fastened by a bronze pistol-shaped pin made in Tula.* The young man turned round, looked at the carriage, put his hand to his cap, which the wind threatened to blow off, and went on his way.

When the carriage entered the courtyard, the gentleman was greeted by the inn servant, or waiter as they are called in Russian inns, a man who span around so nimbly that it was quite impossible to get a look at his face. He came running out swiftly, a napkin in his hand, a lanky man in a long denim frock coat whose back came up to the nape of his neck; he shook his hair and swiftly led the gentleman upstairs and along the length of the wooden veranda, to show him to the room God had granted him. The room was the familiar sort, for the hotel was also the sort familiar in provincial capitals, where for two roubles a day travellers get a quiet room with cockroaches black as damsons peeking out of every corner, and with a door, blocked by a chest of drawers, leading to a room where someone else is staying, taciturn and unobtrusive but extremely inquisitive and curious about every detail of his neighbour, the traveller. The hotel’s exterior façade matched its interior: it was very long and two storeys high. The lower storey was of plain dark-red brick, even darker thanks to the deleterious effects of the seasons, and dirty by its very nature. The upper storey was painted the inevitable yellow. Built into the lower storey were shops selling yokes, ropes and wooden balls to protect horses’ legs from chafing. In the corner shop, or in the window to be precise, a spiced-drink seller was sitting, with a copper samovar and a face equally copper-coloured, so that at a distance you might think that there were two samovars in the window, were it not that one of these samovars had a beard as black as pitch.

While the new arrival was examining his room, his luggage was brought in: first of all, a white leather suitcase, somewhat battered, obviously much travelled. The suitcase was carried in by the driver, Selifan, a squat fellow wearing a sheepskin jacket, and by the footman Petrushka, about thirty years old, a rather surly-looking fellow with a very thick nose and lips, wearing a floppy, well-worn frock coat, clearly a hand-me-down from his master. The suitcase was followed by a mahogany carrying case with Karelian birch* inlay, shoe trees and a roast chicken wrapped in greaseproof paper. When all this had been brought in, Selifan the driver set off for the stables to attend to the horses, while Petrushka the footman began to make himself at home in the small hallway, a very dark kennel of a place which he had already filled with his greatcoat and his own peculiar smell, which imbued the sack of footman’s things that he had brought in. He fixed a narrow three-legged bedstead to the wall of this kennel and covered it with a miniature mattress, as flat and battered, and perhaps just as greasy, as the pancake which he had managed to wheedle from the hotelier.

While the servants were busy sorting everything out, the gentleman set off for the dining room. Any traveller knows only too well wha...

Table of contents

• Introduction