死魂灵是谁的作品（死魂灵DeadSouls）

死魂灵是谁的作品（死魂灵DeadSouls）Dead Souls first published in 1842 is the great prose classic of Russia. That amazing institution “the Russian novel ” not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it like the limbs of a single tree. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier w

死魂灵
Dead Souls
尼古莱·瓦西里耶维奇·果戈理
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Russian writer was first published in 1842 and is one of the most prominent works of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose" and within the book as a "novel in verse". Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part Gogol destroyed it shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne's Sentimental Journey) it is usually regarded as complete in the extant form.

In Russia before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 landowners were entitled to own serfs to farm their land. Serfs were for most purposes considered the property of the landowner and could be bought sold or mortgaged against as any other chattel. To count serfs (and people in general) the measure word "soul" was used: e.g. "six souls of serfs". The plot of the novel relies on "dead souls" (i.e. "dead serfs") which are still accounted for in property registers. On another level the title refers to the "dead souls" of Gogol's characters all of which visualise different aspects of poshlost (an untranslatable Russian word which is perhaps best rendered as "self-satisfied inferiority" moral and spiritual with overtones of middle-class pretentiousness fake significance and philistinism). (Wikipedia)

《死魂灵》是俄国作家尼古莱·瓦西里耶维奇·果戈理·亚诺夫斯基创作的长篇小说.

该书出版于1842年，是19世纪俄国作家果戈理的代表作品。小说描写了一个投机钻营的骗子（吝啬鬼）——假装成六等文官的乞乞科夫买卖死魂灵（俄国的地主们将他们的农奴叫做“魂灵”）的故事。乞乞科夫来到某市先用一个多星期的时间打通了上至省长下至建筑技师的大小官员的关系，而后去市郊向地主们收买已经死去但尚未注销户口的农奴，准备把他们当做活的农奴抵押给监管委员会，骗取大笔押金。他走访了一个又一个地主，经过激烈的讨价还价，买到一大批死魂灵，当他高高兴兴地凭着早已打通的关系迅速办好了法定的买卖手续后，其罪恶勾当被人揭穿，检察官竟被谣传吓死，乞乞科夫只好匆忙逃走。

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INTRODUCTION

Dead Souls first published in 1842 is the great prose classic of Russia. That amazing institution “the Russian novel ” not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it like the limbs of a single tree. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work by the same author a short story entitled The Cloak; this idea has been wittily expressed by another compatriot who says: “We have all issued out of Gogol’s Cloak.”

Dead Souls which bears the word “Poem” upon the title page of the original has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the Pickwick Papers while E. M. Vogue places its author somewhere between Cervantes and Le Sage. However considerable the influences of Cervantes and Dickens may have been—the first in the matter of structure the other in background humour and detail of characterisation—the predominating and distinguishing quality of the work is undeniably something foreign to both and quite peculiar to itself; something which for want of a better term might be called the quality of the Russian soul. The English reader familiar with the works of Dostoieffsky Turgenev and Tolstoi need hardly be told what this implies; it might be defined in the words of the French critic just named as “a tendency to pity.” One might indeed go further and say that it implies a certain tolerance of one’s characters even though they be in the conventional sense knaves products as the case might be of conditions or circumstance which after all is the thing to be criticised and not the man. But pity and tolerance are rare in satire even in clash with it producing in the result a deep sense of tragic humour. It is this that makes of Dead Souls a unique work peculiarly Gogolian peculiarly Russian and distinct from its author’s Spanish and English masters.

Still more profound are the contradictions to be seen in the author’s personal character; and unfortunately they prevented him from completing his work. The trouble is that he made his art out of life and when in his final years he carried his struggle as Tolstoi did later back into life he repented of all he had written and in the frenzy of a wakeful night burned all his manuscripts including the second part of Dead Souls only fragments of which were saved. There was yet a third part to be written. Indeed the second part had been written and burned twice. Accounts differ as to why he had burned it finally. Religious remorse fury at adverse criticism and despair at not reaching ideal perfection are among the reasons given. Again it is said that he had destroyed the manuscript with the others inadvertently.