In Search of Lost Books by Giorgio van Straten

Author:Giorgio van Straten [Giorgio van Straten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782273738
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2017-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

Moscow, 1852:

A Divine Comedy of the Steppes

IN ALL OF THE CASES that I have dealt with thus far, the disappearance of the lost books in question could hardly be attributed to those who actually wrote them, or to some culpable carelessness or involuntary complicity on the part of the author, as will turn out to be the case with Malcolm Lowry.

In the story that I am relating here, however, it was the author’s very perfectionism, his desire to give to the world something superior to everything and everyone that had gone before him – an incomparable masterpiece – that doomed the work to inevitable failure. It was this very desire to produce a flawless work of art, one that could combine his thinking about both literature and morality, which ended up by precipitating a human as well as a creative tragedy.

I am referring to Nikolai Gogol, one of the greats of nineteenth-century Russian literature and the author of such unforgettable stories as ‘The Overcoat’ and ‘The Nose’, and above all, the novel Dead Souls. It is this novel that is the victim of the story I am about to tell.

Dead Souls can be found in any bookshop, yet what we are able to read under that title is in reality only the first part of what should have been a much longer work, designed to be even more impressive in scope. Five chapters of a second part have survived and are frequently included in an appendix to the book we have, but they represent only a first draft that was abandoned by its author out of dissatisfaction with the work. According to Gogol’s conception of the novel, it should in fact have been tripartite – like a kind of Divine Comedy of the steppes – with an Inferno, a Purgatory and a Paradise.

In the first part, the one published in the author’s lifetime, the protagonist Chichikov presents himself in a small provincial Russian town with the aim of acquiring ‘dead souls’ – that is to say serfs who have passed on to a better life but are still present in the census of the State, and for whom, consequently, their owners are still obliged to pay tax. What on earth can he be doing with them? Why is he buying them up? Everybody wants to know. Yet everyone is nevertheless quite willing to profit from selling them, in order to save on their taxes. And Chichikov profits substantially too, by mortgaging these nonexistent souls to raise capital to invest and to spend.

Gogol based the story on a notorious case related to him by Pushkin, who was apparently somewhat annoyed by his friend’s subsequent creative appropriation of it.

The first volume of Dead Souls came out in 1842, originally published for reasons of censorship under the title The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, since by definition souls were immortal and when combined with this adjective were better off being relegated to a subtitle. It was a resounding success. It was also

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