Dead Souls

I’m usually a big fan of classic Russian Literature. Fun fact: when I was sixteen, I made the nerdiest possible project comparing British and Russian Literature of the mid-late nineteenth century, purely by choice. Tolstoy, love him; ‘Anna Karenina’ is my all-time favourite book. Dostoyevsky has a bad tendency to ramble, but it’s always worth making it to the end. Even Turgenev I can enjoy for his aesthetic prose and social commentary.

I think it’s safe to say that I had high expectations for Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls’, and the mystique surrounding it as an unfinished manuscript only heightened my excitement.

It pains me to say it, but I hated it.

Maybe I’m being harsh, maybe it was unenjoyable because (as the editor only deemed to mention near the end of the novel) it was a bad translation of a bad translation from the original Russian.

There were certainly moments where I felt like Gogol was a genius social commentator who had managed to encapsulate what I feel are philosophical truths about human life and connections. To give him credit, the beginning was much better than the middle and the end, and rumour has it Gogol lost his mind over trying to work out the ending. Overwhelmingly, however, it was overly long, boring and repetitive with an onslaught of pointless characters who were pontificated over for far too long.

In places, Gogol’s vision became clear, though he didn’t often manage to achieve it. There were moments where I, as a writer, quite appreciated his technique in writing a self-conscious narrator. Yet, this was taken too far in self-indulgent, never-ending character studies, which even the narrator himself acknowledged nobody could care about.

It was never explained what exactly the relevance of the dead souls was (no spoilers, no more details, I’m sorry).

One of the key motivators for the protagonist was to find a wife, a theme that was forgotten for large periods of the book and only mentioned very briefly at the end.

The main character was very compelling and had an interesting back story, despite the narrator constantly suggesting otherwise.

It wasn’t a short book, and making it to the end felt like completing a marathon in scorching heat with no supporters (my Mum offered to throw it in the bin to end my suffering several times). I thought if I made it to the end, I’d be pleased, proud that I could say that I had read it.

Was it worth it? I guess so…

Would I recommend it? Only to people who’ve given me bad recommendations in the past!