First published in 1842, Nikolai
Gogol’s Dead Souls still ranks as one of the most prominent comic novels
in the history of world literature. U.R. Bowie, Ph.D., who taught Russian
literature for thirty years at Miami University, delves into the book’s
multivarious themes and stylistic quirks, including, e.g., the grotesque in
Gogol, the socio-political thematics, the leitmotif of boots, the metaphysics
of Dead Souls, irony and satire, misogyny, the theme of the creative
imagination, names and naming, the leitmotif of food, megalomania, the laughter
of Dead Souls, verisimilitude, expanded metaphors and digressions, liars
and lying, the music of Gogol’s prose, the leitmotif of the road, stylistic
skazifications, authorial prolepsis, narrators omniscient and otherwise, the
leitmotif of dumbfounded, and more. In an appendix six different translations
of the novel into English are compared and evaluated.
