Where was the poem Dead Souls written? The history of writing the poem by N.V. Gogol 'Dead Souls'

Poem by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol “ Dead souls“You have to read it in 9th grade. It was written in the 30s and 40s of the 19th century. The author worked on his work for a long time, since his initial idea, which was to show “at least from one side all of Rus',” gradually transformed into a more global idea: to show “the whole depth of the abomination” that exists in Rus' in order to push society "towards beauty". It cannot be said that the author achieved his ultimate goal, but, as Herzen believed, the poem “Dead Souls” shocked Russia. The author defined his work as a prose poem; the text contains many lyrical digressions. If it weren’t for them, then the result would be a classic novel - a journey, or, in the European sense, a “punctual” novel, since the main character of the work is a real swindler. The plot of the poem was suggested to Gogol by A.S. Pushkin shortly before his death.

Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” shows the social structure as truthfully as possible Russian Empire The 20-30s of the 19th century - a time when the state was experiencing certain upheavals: the death of Emperor Alexander I, the Decembrist uprising, the beginning of the reign of the new emperor, Nicholas I. The author draws a capital ruled by ministers and generals, a classic provincial town, in which officials, nobles and merchants rule, draws a classical landowner's estate and a fortress village, where the main character of the poem, Chichikov, visits in search of the so-called “dead souls”. The author, without being embarrassed or afraid of censorship, shows all the negative character traits of “managers” and “those in power,” speaks of bureaucratic and landowner arbitrariness, and draws “the evil and vile world of real slave owners.”

All this is opposed in the poem lyrical image this people's Russia, which the author admires. The images of “people from the people” are deeper, purer, softer; one feels that their souls are alive, that their aspirations come down to only one thing - to free life. The author speaks about people's dreams with sadness and pain, but at the same time one can feel his genuine belief that someday there will be no Chichikovs and Sobakeviches, that Russia will get rid of “landowner oppression” and “rise from its knees to greatness and glory” . The poem “Dead Souls” is a kind of social manifesto, an encyclopedia from which you can study all the disadvantages of the prevailing social order. N. Gogol, like many other enlightened people, understood what exactly serfdom slows down the development of the empire. If Russia can throw off its shackles, it will leap forward and take a leading position on the world stage. It is not for nothing that Belinsky said that Gogol boldly and in a new way took a look at Russian reality, not fearing the consequences, drawing a future in which it is no longer the feudal nobles who are the “masters of life”, but the Russian peasant, the one who moves the country forward and, being free, does not spare himself and his strength. You can download or read N. Gogol’s work completely online on our website.

Work on the poem began in 1835. From Gogol’s “Author’s Confession,” his letters, and from the memoirs of his contemporaries, it is known that the plot of this work, as well as the plot of “The Inspector General,” was suggested to him by Pushkin. Pushkin, who was the first to unravel the originality and uniqueness of Gogol’s talent, which consisted in the ability to “guess a person and make him look like a living person with a few features,” advised Gogol to take on a large and serious essay. He told him about one rather clever swindler (whom he himself had heard from someone), who was trying to get rich by pawning the dead souls he had bought as living souls in the guardianship council.

Many stories have been preserved about real buyers of dead souls, in particular about the Ukrainian landowners of the first thirds of the XIX centuries, who quite often resorted to such an “operation” in order to acquire the qualification for the right to distill distillation. Even one distant relative of Gogol was named among this kind of buyer. The purchase and sale of living revision souls was an everyday, everyday, ordinary fact. The plot of the poem turned out to be quite realistic.

In October 1835, Gogol informed Pushkin: “I began to write.” Dead souls" The plot stretches out into a long novel and, it seems, will be very funny.<...>In this novel I want to show at least from one side the whole of “Rus”.

From this letter one can see the task set by the writer. The plot of the conceived “pre-long novel” was mainly built, apparently, more on positions than on characters, with a predominance of a comic, humorous tone, rather than a satirical one.

Gogol read the first chapters of his work to Pushkin. He expected that the monsters coming from his pen would make the poet laugh. In fact, they made a completely different impression on him. “Dead Souls” revealed to Pushkin a new world, previously unknown to him, and horrified him with the impenetrable quagmire that provincial Russian life was at that time. It is not surprising that as he read, Gogol says, Pushkin became increasingly gloomy and gloomy, “finally becoming completely gloomy.” When the reading was over, he said in a voice of melancholy: “God, how sad our Russia is!” Pushkin’s exclamation amazed Gogol, forced him to look more carefully and seriously at his plan, to reconsider artistic method processing of living material. He began to think “how to soften the painful impression” that “Dead Souls” could make, how to avoid the “frightening absence of light” in his “very long and funny novel.” Pondering further work, Gogol, reproducing dark sides Russian life, interspersing funny events with touching ones, wants to create “a complete composition, where there would be more than one thing to laugh at.”

In these statements, although in embryo, one can already discern the author’s intention, along with the dark sides of life, to give bright, positive ones. But this did not mean at all that the writer necessarily wanted to find the bright, positive aspects of life in the world of landowner and bureaucratic Russia. Apparently, in the chapters read to Pushkin for Gogol, the author’s personal attitude to the depicted had not yet been clearly defined; the work was not yet permeated with the spirit of subjectivity due to the lack of a clear ideological and aesthetic concept.

“Dead Souls” was written abroad (mostly in Rome), where Gogol went after the production of “The Inspector General” in the spring of 1836 in the most dejected and painful state. The waves of muddy and malicious hatred that fell upon the author of “The Inspector General” from many critics and journalists made a stunning impression on him. It seemed to Gogol that the comedy aroused an unfriendly attitude among all layers of Russian society. Feeling lonely, not appreciated by his compatriots for his good intentions to serve them in exposing untruths, he went abroad.

Gogol's letters suggest that he left home country not in order to relive his insult, but to “think about his responsibilities as an author, his future creations” and create “with great reflection.” Being far from his homeland, Gogol was connected with Russia in his heart, thought about it, sought to learn about everything that was happening there, turned to friends and acquaintances with a request to inform him about everything that was happening in the country. “My eyes,” he writes, “most often look only at Russia and there is no measure of my love for her.” Immense love for the fatherland inspired Gogol and guided him in his work on “ Dead souls" In the name of prosperity native land the writer intended, with the full force of his civil indignation, to brand the evil, self-interest and untruth that were so deeply rooted in Russia. Gogol was aware that “new classes and many different masters” would rise up against him, but convinced that Russia needed his flagellating satire, he worked a lot, intensely, persistently on his creation.

Soon after leaving abroad, Gogol wrote to Zhukovsky: “The dead are flowing alive... and it completely seems to me as if I were in Russia.”<...>.. I’m completely immersed in Dead Souls.”

If in a letter to Pushkin dated October 7, 1835, Gogol defined “Dead Souls” as a basically comic and humorous novel, then the further the writer’s work on the work went, the broader and deeper his plan became. 12 November 1836, he informs Zhukovsky: “I redid everything I started again, thought more over the whole plan and now I am writing it calmly, like a chronicle... If I complete this creation the way it needs to be done, then... what a huge, what an original plot ! What a varied bunch! All Rus' will appear in it!<...>My creation is enormously great and its end will not come soon.”

So, genre definition works - a poem, its hero - all of Rus'. After 16 days, Gogol informs Pogodin: “The thing that I am sitting and working on now and which I have been thinking about for a long time, and which I will think about for a long time, is not like either a story or a novel.”<...>If God helps me complete my poem as it should, then this will be my first decent creation: all of Rus' will respond to it.” Here the title of the new work, already given in the letter to Pushkin, is confirmed, and again it is said that this is a poem that will cover all of Rus'. He also says in 1842 in a letter to Pletnev that Gogol wants to give a single complex image of Rus', wants his homeland to appear “in all its enormity.” The definition of the genre of the future work - a poem - indisputably testified that it was based on a “all-Russian scale”, that Gogol thought in national categories. Hence the many common signs that carry a generalizing semantic function, the appearance of such statements as “U us in Rus'" .... "y us not that" ..., "in our opinion custom" ..., "what with us there are common rooms,” etc.

So gradually, in the course of work, “Dead Souls” turned from a novel into a poem about Russian life, where the focus was on the “personality” of Russia, embraced from all sides at once, “in full scope” and holistically.

The heaviest blow for Gogol was the death of Pushkin. “My life, my highest pleasure died with him,” we read in his letter to Pogodin. “I didn’t do anything, didn’t write anything without his advice.” He took an oath from me to write.” From now on, Gogol considers the work on “Dead Souls” to be the fulfillment of Pushkin’s will: “I must continue the great work I began, which Pushkin took the word from me to write, whose thought is his creation and which has since become a sacred testament for me.”

From the diary of A.I. Turgenev it is known that when Gogol was with him in Paris in 1838, he read “excerpts from his novel “Dead Souls.” A true, living picture in Russia of our bureaucratic, noble life, our statehood... It’s funny and painful.” In Rome in the same year 1838, Gogol reads to Zhukovsky, Shevyrev, and Pogodin who arrived there, chapters about Chichikov’s arrival in the city of N, about Manilov, and Korobochka.

On September 13, 1839, Gogol came to Russia and read four chapters of the manuscript in St. Petersburg from N. Ya. Prokopovich; in February-April 1840, he read a number of chapters in Moscow from S. T. Aksakov, with whose family by this time he had developed friendly relations relationship. Moscow friends enthusiastically greeted the new work and gave a lot of advice. The writer, taking them into account, again began to redo, “re-clean” the already completed edition of the book.

In the spring and summer of 1840 in Rome, Gogol, rewriting the revised text of Dead Souls, again made changes and corrections to the manuscript. Repetitions and lengths are removed, whole new pages, scenes, additional characteristics appear, lyrical digressions, individual words and phrases are replaced. Work on the work testifies to the enormous tension and rise of the writer’s creative powers: “everything further appeared clearer and more majestic for him.”

In the fall of 1841, Gogol came to Moscow and, while the first six chapters were being whitewashed, read the remaining five chapters of the first book to the Aksakov family and M. Pogodin. Friends now with particular insistence pointed out the one-sided, negative character depictions of Russian life, noted that the poem gives only “half the girth, and not the entire girth” of the Russian world. They demanded to see another one, positive side life of Russia. Gogol, apparently, heeded this advice and made important insertions into the completely rewritten volume. In one of them, Chichikov takes up arms against tailcoats and balls that came from the West, from France, and are contrary to the Russian spirit and Russian nature. In another, a solemn promise is made that in the future “a formidable blizzard of inspiration will rise and the majestic thunder of other speeches will be heard.

The ideological turning point in Gogol’s consciousness, which began to emerge in the second half of the 30s, led to the fact that the writer decided to serve his fatherland not only by exposing “to general ridicule” everything that desecrated and obscured the ideal to which a Russian could and should strive man, but also showing this ideal itself. Gogol now saw the book in three volumes. The first volume was supposed to capture the shortcomings of Russian life, the people hindering its development; the second and third are to indicate the path to the resurrection of “dead souls,” even such as Chichikov or Plyushkin. “Dead Souls” turned out to be a work in which pictures of a broad and objective display of Russian life would serve as a direct means of promoting high moral principles. The realist writer became a preacher-moralist.

Of his enormous plan, Gogol managed to fully implement only the first part.

At the beginning of December 1841, the manuscript of the first volume of Dead Souls was submitted to the Moscow censorship committee for consideration. But rumors that reached Gogol about unfavorable rumors among the committee members prompted him to take the manuscript back. In an effort to get “Dead Souls” through the St. Petersburg censorship, he sent the manuscript with Belinsky, who arrived in Moscow at that time, but the St. Petersburg censorship was in no hurry to review the poem. Gogol waited, full of anxiety and confusion. Finally, in mid-February 1842, permission was received to print Dead Souls. However, censorship changed the title of the work, demanding that it be called “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls” and thereby trying to divert the reader’s attention from social issues poem, focusing his attention mainly on the adventures of the rogue Chichikov.

Censorship categorically banned The Tale of Captain Kopeikin. Gogol, who valued it very much and wanted to preserve “The Tale...” at all costs, was forced to remake it and place all the blame for the disasters of Captain Kopeikin on Kopeikin himself, and not on someone indifferent to fate ordinary people the tsar's minister, as it was originally.

On May 21, 1842, the first copies of the poem were received, and two days later an announcement appeared in the Moskovskie Vedomosti newspaper that the book had gone on sale.

What everyone should know about immortal work Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Text: Sergey Volkov, Evgenia Vovchenko
Photo: artists Lesha Frey/metronews.ru and Mikhail Kheifets/plakat-msh

“Dead Souls” by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was read by everyone. Whether completely or carefully is another question. In the meantime, Chichikov’s adventures are an obligatory part school curriculum, and schoolchildren patiently look for lyrical digressions, carefully analyze the life of landowners with such speaking surnames: Korobochka, Manilov, Nozdryov, are trying to understand the meaning of what has already become catchphrase“Rus, where are you going? give me the answer..."
But how many people reread Gogol after school? Are you ready to return to this mysterious work and look at it with your own adult eyes, and not with the eyes of school teacher, who is usually taken at his word. But sometimes you really want to show off your erudition among your friends, showing yourself to be an educated and well-read person. It is precisely for such people that the “Yes to Reading” project was invented, where in a few hours of intensive lectures you can fill in your gaps in literature. The project lecturer, a teacher of Russian language and literature, offers his own set of facts that everyone needs to know about the immortal “Dead Souls”.

10 facts about “Dead Souls”

1.

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It is believed that the plot of the work was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. Most likely, he grew up from Pletnev about his imminent marriage and about his dowry, formed after mortgaging 200 souls.

3.

The first volume was written abroad. As I noticed, “It’s scary to say that you not only love your country more from afar, but you also see it better and understand it better. Remember that our great genius

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol worked on the main work of his life, the poem “Dead Souls,” for seventeen years, from October 1835 to February 1852.

An interesting and unusual plot was offered to a promising to a young writer Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Pushkin himself took the plot from real life during his stay in exile in Chisinau.

He was amazed amazing story that for a number of years in one of the towns on the Dniester, according to official data, no one died. The solution turned out to be simple: fugitive peasants were hiding under the names of the dead.

Story writing Dead The shower is interesting because in 1831 Pushkin told this story to Gogol, slightly modifying it, and in 1835 he received news from Nikolai Vasilyevich that the writer had begun writing a long and very funny novel based on the plot given to him. In the new plot, the main character is an enterprising figure who buys dead peasants from landowners, who are still alive in revision tales, and pawns their “souls” in the Guardian Council to obtain a loan.

Work on the future brilliant novel began in St. Petersburg, but mainly the history of writing Dead Souls developed abroad, where Gogol went in the summer of 1836. Before leaving, he read several chapters to his inspiration, Alexander Pushkin, who a few months later was mortally wounded in a duel. After such a tragic event, Gogol was simply obliged to complete the work he had begun, thereby paying tribute to the memory of the deceased poet.

Sweden, France, Italy became the creative workshops of an unrivaled artist of words. While in his especially beloved city of Rome, Gogol made it a rule to write three pages in his manuscript every morning. Periodically, the writer came to Moscow and St. Petersburg and introduced the public to excerpts from his poem.

In 1841, the six-year work of writing the first volume of Dead Souls was completed. But in Moscow, problems arose with passing censorship, and then the manuscript, with the help famous critic Belinsky was transported to St. Petersburg.

In the capital, on March 9, 1842, the censor A. Nikitenko finally signed the censorship permit, and freshly printed copies of the book called “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls” were released on May 21. The original title was changed at the request of the censorship committee.

The history of writing Dead Souls is interesting because in 1831 Pushkin told this story to Gogol, slightly modifying it, and in 1835 he received news from Nikolai Vasilyevich that the writer had already begun writing it.

The last decade of Nikolai Gogol's work

Last decade the writer’s life was devoted to writing the second volume of the poem “Dead Souls”, and in the future there should have been a third part (like Dante Alighieri in his poem “ Divine Comedy", which includes three components). In 1845, Gogol considered that the content of the second volume was not elevated and enlightened enough, and in an emotional outburst he burned the manuscript.

It was completed in 1852 new option volumes of the poem, but he suffered the same fate: the great creation was thrown into the fire on the night of February 12. Perhaps the reason was that the writer’s confessor, Matvey Konstantinovsky, who had read the manuscript, spoke unflatteringly about some chapters of the poem. After the archpriest left Moscow, Nikolai Gogol practically stopped eating and destroyed the manuscript.

A few days later, on February 21, 1852, the great Russian writer passed away - he went into eternity following his creation. But part of the second volume still reached posterity thanks to the draft manuscripts preserved after Gogol’s death. A contemporary of Nikolai Gogol and his great admirer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, believed that the brilliant book “Dead Souls” should become a reference book for every enlightened person.

DEAD SOULS

Poem N.V. Gogol.

Chichikov. From the album “Types from Dead Souls.” Artist A.M. Boklevsky. 1895:


Still from the TV movie M.A. Schweitzer "Dead Souls". Plyushkin - I. Smoktunovsky:


Sobakevich. From the album “Types from Dead Souls.” Artist A.M. Boklevsky. 1895:


Manilov. From the album “Types from Dead Souls.” Artist A.M. Boklevsky. 1895:

Russia. Large linguistic and cultural dictionary. - M.: State Institute of Russian Language named after. A.S. Pushkin. AST-Press. T.N. Chernyavskaya, K.S. Miloslavskaya, E.G. Rostova, O.E. Frolova, V.I. Borisenko, Yu.A. Vyunov, V.P. Chudnov. 2007 .

See what "DEAD SOULS" are in other dictionaries:

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