In this blog post, we will examine how the burning of the second volume of ‘Dead Souls’, his stay in Rome, and his religious conversion brought about changes in his literature, focusing on Gogol’s life and literary world.

Gogol’s Life

Gogol was born on March 19, 1809 (Julian calendar), in Poltava, Ukraine. While early records contained confusion regarding his date of birth, recent research has established that the date commemorated by his family—March 19 on the Julian calendar—is his actual birthday, which corresponds to April 1 on the Gregorian calendar.
His family was generally harmonious and deeply affectionate. Based on various sources describing his parents’ marital affection and love for their children, as well as his respect for them, it appears he grew up in a home where affection and stability were reasonably assured.
After enrolling in the gymnasium in Nezhin in 1821, Gogol was exposed to a wide range of Ukrainian and Russian culture and arts. During his school years, he attracted the attention of his friends and teachers with his innate linguistic ability, talent for imitation, artistic sensibility, and rich imagination; his teachers, in turn, passionately imparted European, Russian, and Ukrainian culture to him.
However, he also suffered significant losses during his childhood. He experienced deep sorrow after losing his younger brother at the age of ten and his father at fifteen, and he showed a tendency to try to transcend these losses through religion. At the same time, during his time in Ukraine, he was convinced of his own talent and noble mission, believing that these ideals would be realized in society and bring him great honor.
Immediately after graduating from the gymnasium in 1828, Gogol went to St. Petersburg with lofty dreams. At the time, he published romantic poems, epics, and short stories under the pen name “Alof,” but his poems were harshly criticized, and he failed the audition for the Imperial Theater. Meanwhile, as he experienced life as a low-ranking civil servant, he was deeply shocked by his simultaneous exposure to both the city’s underclass and the glamorous popular culture of the upper class.
In 1831–1832, he gained widespread popularity with ‘Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka’, a collection of romantic legends and folk tales, and met Pushkin, whom he had long admired. However, he suffered from severe depression in 1833. In 1834, while working as an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Petersburg University, he taught history but did not receive favorable reviews due to his approach, which relied on stimulating the imagination.
In 1835, he published ‘Arabesques’, a collection of essays and stories set in St. Petersburg, followed by ‘Mirgorod’, set in Ukraine, and was recognized as a notable writer in literary circles. Around this time, he resigned from his position as a history professor and resolved to devote himself entirely to writing.
Taking Pushkin’s advice, Gogol began writing the first volume of his novel ‘Dead Souls’ based on motifs provided by Pushkin. In 1836, the premiere of his play ‘The Inspector General’ was a popular success, but when audiences and fellow writers interpreted the work merely as a social satire, he felt disillusioned that his religious and moral intentions had been distorted. He subsequently left for Europe, settling in Rome, where he continued his creative work.
For approximately 12 years after 1836, he resided primarily in Rome, writing or revising his major works. The year 1842 is considered the pinnacle of his creative career. That year, he published the short story “The Overcoat” along with an anthology containing revised versions of “Taras Bulba” and “The Portrait”; he released “Marriage,” “Rome,” and “The Gambler”; and, most importantly, he published the first volume of “Dead Souls,” which caused a major sensation.
Volume 1 of ‘Dead Souls’ exposed the corruption and vulgarity of Russian society through irony and satire, sparking widespread public and critical debate. Opinions were divided among Slavophiles and liberals; some condemned the work as a harsh criticism of Russia, while others paradoxically argued that it sanctified the country.
After the publication of the first volume, many expected the second volume to follow soon, but although its outline had already taken shape in 1841–1842, the writing process was prolonged. In 1845, he completed a draft of the second volume but burned it. This incident became a turning point, marking a significant shift in his inner conflict and creative direction.
From 1846 to 1852, Gogol immersed himself in religious practice, devouring the Bible and religious texts, and actively embraced a religious life, including pilgrimages to holy sites such as Jerusalem. During this period, he restructured his views on society and art, writing religious and introspective works such as “Meditations on a Hymn,” “Letters to a Friend,” and “A Writer’s Confession.”
Following this period of spiritual practice, Gogol completed the second edition of Volume 2 between late 1851 and early 1852. He handed the manuscript to his spiritual mentor, an Orthodox monk, asking for his opinion, but the monk criticized parts of it as weak. Consequently, Gogol burned the manuscript for Volume 2 again in February 1852 and died just over ten days later.
Medically, the cause of his death has been attributed to starvation, typhus, or severe depression. From a religious perspective, it has been interpreted as a state of utter despair and psychological panic, though there is also a view that sees it as an act intended to bring about rebirth and resurrection through self-emptying. Meanwhile, in the early 20th century, claims emerged that his soul had been buried alive in a state of astral projection, and this theory garnered attention for a time.
To this day, Gogol’s death remains even more of a mystery than his birth. The bizarre and fantastical narrative of his final days is as legendary as works such as “The Nose” or “The Overcoat,” and continues to spark diverse interpretations and debates.

Periodization of Gogol’s Literary World

Over the past 150 years, Gogol’s literary world has been analyzed from various perspectives by critics and scholars in both the West and Russia. The debate generally divides into two camps: one questioning whether his literature possesses internal consistency, and the other arguing that there were significant breaks and a decline in his work.
Those who prioritize religious, cultural, and psychological approaches emphasize the internal consistency and unified worldview of Gogol’s literature. In contrast, the modernist school, which emphasizes social context, realism, and aesthetic purity, points to a decline in creative power and internal discontinuity in his later works. These differing perspectives form the main pillars of Gogol’s interpretation.
Traditionally, Gogol’s works have been divided into three periods based on setting, theme, style, and worldview. The three-period classification proposed by critics such as Belinsky and Beloi from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century remains widely recognized today.
One typical classification is as follows. First Period (Pre-St. Petersburg, Thesis): Early works written around 1829–1831 belong to this period. Second Period (St. Petersburg Period, Antithesis): This includes the St. Petersburg series and satirical short stories from 1833 to 1836. Phase 3 (European and Moscow periods, Synthesis): This includes the mature works centered on ‘Dead Souls’.
From a realist perspective, the periods are distinguished slightly differently: the period of ‘Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka’ and ‘Mirgorod’, set in Ukraine, is considered the first; the second includes stories centered on St. Petersburg and the play ‘The Inspector General’; and the third is the period during which he worked on his only novel, ‘Dead Souls’.
However, this periodization risks obscuring the multifaceted nature of Gogol’s work. Since he created works with different settings, genres, themes, and linguistic styles almost simultaneously, categorizing his work uniformly based solely on setting or theme can give the impression that change occurred in only one direction.
Furthermore, as Belkin and Belinsky pointed out, it is significant that Gogol underwent a religious conversion around 1840, leading him to redefine his worldview and artistic philosophy. However, traditional classifications often tend not to recognize the second volume of ‘Dead Souls’ and the religious writings he published as central texts in his literary trajectory.
Following the collapse of the Soviet regime, interest in Gogol’s religious worldview and his later artistic philosophy has grown once again, and attempts to reevaluate his final decade from a religious perspective have become active. This reevaluation has contributed to reading him not merely as a writer who lost his early satirical techniques, but as one who underwent deep spiritual exploration and self-transformation.
Ultimately, it is repeatedly argued that to understand Gogol’s literary world, one must consider the complex interplay of coexisting factors—genre experimentation, social satire, personal religious experience, and self-reflection—rather than relying solely on simple chronological divisions.

The Composition Period of “Dead Souls” Volume 2

It appears that Gogol conceived of “Dead Souls” Volume 2 and began writing in earnest around 1841–1842. The first edition was published in 1845, and thereafter, Gogol continued working on Volume 2 for approximately six to seven years, concurrently engaging in religious practice and the reconstruction of his worldview.
If we highly value the passion Gogol poured into the second volume and the complexity of that work, it is advisable to understand the writing period of ‘Dead Souls’—generally considered to be between 1836 and 1852—in a more nuanced way, using 1842 or 1845 as reference points.

Repetition and Difference in Gogol’s Literary World

Gogol’s personal temperament—idealization and melancholy—constantly interacted with his external religious and cultural environment, producing partial and dynamic results. His psychological disposition combined with four external structures—personal experience, the artistic influences of the Baroque and Romanticism, Orthodox culture and Christian principles, and modern culture—to shape the content and form of his works. Although the manifestations of this interaction vary, there is consistency in the underlying emotions and form.
1) The Interaction Between Innate Temperament and Personal Experience
Gogol was a man with a naturally strong tendency toward mystification, idealization, and ideologization, coupled with deep melancholy. This is closely linked to the mystical inclinations, rich artistic sensibility, and linguistic talent he inherited from his mother. His mother genuinely believed in mysterious dreams concerning her marriage and told young Gogol vivid stories about the Last Judgment, leaving indelible visual impressions on his mind.
This temperament was further strengthened by experiences of family loss. When his younger brother Ivan died at the age of ten, Gogol visited the grave almost every day and fell into deep despair. Despite his parents’ financial difficulties, he was sent to the gymnasium in Nezhin. Then, at the age of fifteen, when he lost his father as well, he felt extreme melancholy, though he later confided to his mother that he had overcome it by sublimating it into a religious experience.
Later, the deaths of Pushkin (1837) and his young friend Count Bielogorsky in 1839 dealt a severe blow to his worldview and sensibilities. Gogol lamented these deaths from the perspective that “all that is beautiful must die,” viewing Pushkin’s death in particular as a national loss for Russia as well as an aesthetic and metaphysical loss.
Meanwhile, his passionate confession of love for an unknown woman in his late teens (in a letter to his mother in 1829) clearly reveals his tendency toward mystification and idealization. He described her as a being of heavenly beauty and claimed to have experienced both extreme ecstasy and profound melancholy, but the facts regarding the woman’s actual existence have not been verified by his contemporaries and remain ambiguous.
2) The Interaction Between Dualistic Christian Culture and Secular Culture
The environments in which Gogol grew up—including the Baroque of Ukraine and Rome, the Romanticism of Germany and Russia, and the Orthodox Christian culture of Ukraine and Russia—were closely intertwined with his melancholy and mystical thinking, sparking his religious and artistic literary world. Baroque culture possesses the quality of transforming death and decay in everyday life, the transience of existence, and eschatological awareness into cultural myths, while simultaneously accompanying a desire for the playfulness and pleasures of life. These complex elements of the Baroque likely served as the cultural nourishment that ensured melancholy was always inherent in Gogol’s lighthearted comedy.
Meanwhile, the complexity of the Baroque continues in European culture through an emotional structure characterized by a longing for the religious and aesthetic ideals of Romanticism and the sorrow arising from the insurmountable gap between those ideals and reality. Gogol created his early works while assimilated into the German and Russian Romantic cultural spheres; as a result, his works are permeated with a melancholy stemming from a longing for eternal ideals and a tragic awareness of their unattainability.
Scholars have observed that Gogol was exposed to different manifestations of Baroque culture during the following three periods: First, the Ukrainian period (1809–1828); second, the St. Petersburg period (1829–1836); and third, the European—primarily Italian—period (1836–1848). These cultural experiences influenced his integration of melancholy into his language and comedic sensibilities.
3) Interaction with Christian Principles as an Object of Personal Faith
Around 1840, as Gogol embraced the Orthodox faith more deeply, he adopted an attitude that treated the Bible and its teachings as a guidebook for life and art, rather than merely cultural Christianity. However, the influences from Baroque, Romanticism, Orthodoxy, and modern culture—which had already been formed earlier—did not completely disappear; they continued to influence the principles of his thought and his major ideologies. The first volume of ‘Dead Souls’, published in 1842, reflects cultural elements from Europe, Russia, and Ukraine alongside modern culture.
During the writing of the second volume, Gogol’s Christian perspective underwent a transformation, and his final years were filled with a determination to sanctify his life and art through the study and meditation of the Bible and religious texts. Not content with personal salvation, he sought to establish a Christian ethic of social reform and to demand its adoption by the public.
Behind his call for social change through his own spiritual cultivation and religious artistic creation lay his innate ethical and socially engaged disposition. Furthermore, his belief in the prophetic status of the poet—a concept conveyed by both Russian Orthodox culture and European Romanticism—served to further strengthen his demands.
However, his prophetic self-awareness and forceful demands largely drew the antipathy of his peers and the public, and many criticized him as a man lost in his own delusions. Those who loved his literary genius worried about its decline, while those who highly valued his social satire lamented the waning of his critical consciousness.
From a Bible-centered Christian perspective, change may require a fundamental shift, akin to the saying, “New wine must be put into new wineskins.” It could be argued that Gogol did not fully follow that path. Ultimately, he did not completely abandon certain non-Christian elements; most notably, an art-centered view of salvation that sought to transform the vulgarity of reality through religious art, Neoplatonic thinking that external beauty reflects inner truth and beauty; Orthodox-centered nationalist ideology; a mystical view of salvation that holds that one can reach the divine realm through human spiritual effort; and the utopian belief that God’s kingdom can be built on earth.
Had he replaced these elements with more traditional and biblical alternatives, his religious journey might have been smoother and could have taken him further.
4) Interaction with Modern Culture
From the early 1830s until his death in 1852, Gogol’s view of Russian society took the form of a combination of Romantic and Christian perspectives. In particular, after 1840, as he sought his own ethical framework for social practice, he became increasingly Christian-centered.
His perspective was largely based on a dualistic view of religion, combined with the anti-Enlightenment outlook of modern Romanticism, and tended to fundamentally reject the anthropocentric currents of modern thought. This attitude appears repeatedly throughout his works and life.

Gogol and the Ambivalence of Modern Culture

Modernity and Ambivalence

His relationship with modern culture is inherently ambivalent. Since Gogol’s Romantic conception of history and his view of art itself reflect the ambivalence of modern culture, this dual nature can also be discerned in his personal attitude.
For example, the German Romantic worldview and universalist historical perspective evident in ‘Arabesques’ are imbued with the modernity of Eurocentric Orientalism. Some might counter that this is simply the result of his almost verbatim imitation of essays by German thinkers. However, the fact that in the same writings Gogol highly praised the lighting effects and detailed representational capabilities of 19th-century art, and acknowledged that even in the 19th century, geniuses of titanic stature could emerge, shows that he did not completely reject the achievements of modern culture and art.

A Dichotomous Critique of Modern Society

On the other hand, it is also clear that Gogol criticized the social structure and lifeworld of modernity in an almost dichotomous manner. He characterized the modern space centered on 19th-century Paris as driven by human desire, rationalism, a view of historical progress through reform, a focus on materialism, economics, and science, and the popularization and secularization of culture.
For him, modernity produced the results of the dualization, fragmentation, alienation, superficiality, mechanization, and de-individualization of reality. Gogol diagnosed that in Russian modern society, formed around St. Petersburg following Peter the Great’s modernization policies, these problems were further amplified by blind Eurocentrism. From this perspective, in his works of 1842, he viewed 19th-century modern culture dichotomously, contrasting it with premodern cultures centered on 18th-century Rome, Ukraine, and Moscow.

The Sharpness of Criticism and Fragmentary Representation

While there are internal contradictions in his idealization of the pre-modern era and his one-sided criticism of the demonic nature of modernity, it cannot be denied that his criticism is extremely sharp and scathing. This is a commonality with the criticism of modernity by some European intellectuals in the late 18th century.
Gogol was ahead of his time in his ability to describe the structure and mechanisms of modern culture using fragmentary and vivid language. Such a fragmentary mode of expression later became widespread in mainland Europe from the late 19th to the early 20th century, and Gogol’s keen sense of reality and ability to depict it functioned as a mechanism for critiquing modernity. It can be argued that he sought to ideally represent the fragmented reality of Russia through the genre of the epic poem and, through such representation, to redeem that fragmented reality.

The Psychological Background and Plot of “Dead Souls”

Psychological Motives for Creation and Two Instances of Burning

In 1845, Gogol burned the manuscript of “Dead Souls,” which he had painstakingly completed over three years, deeming it unfinished, and then set out to rewrite it. To explain this protracted creative process to his readers, he wrote “Correspondence with a Friend” and “The Writer’s Confession” in 1846–1847, through which he sought to clarify the circumstances and psychological motivations behind his work.
Feeling that Pushkin’s advice and the provided material were suitable for him, Gogol wanted the freedom to travel across Russia following a single protagonist and depict a variety of characters. At first, he expected that Chichikov’s absurd plan would naturally draw in a variety of characters and create situations through humor. However, he soon found himself confronted at every turn by the questions “Why? For what reason?” and realized that he must paint a true portrait of contemporary Russian reality in every aspect—structure, characters, language, and theme.
He resolved to grasp the Russian soul through the universal human soul, and vividly recreated the vulgarity of the Russian soul in the first volume. In the second volume, he devoted himself to clearly demonstrating “the methods and paths that would lead everyone toward beauty and nobility”; his act of burning the first edition to achieve this goal in a more complete form was an expression of his will to “die in order to live.”
Gogol sought to become steadfast not only in literature but in life itself, and resolved to act and write with integrity, even if it took time. To this end, he felt the need to understand the circumstances of his contemporaries more deeply, and sought to make his character portrayals even more vivid so that readers would perceive the characters as living beings just like themselves. The characters in Volume 2 became clearer than before, but the perfect form he desired was not realized even in the second edition, and ultimately, that edition was also burned. Nevertheless, he seems to have viewed universal truths emerging from the depths of the Russian soul and society, and to have assessed that he had successfully portrayed them in his own way.

Synopsis of Volume 1

In Volume 1, the protagonist, Chichikov, travels around the provincial Russian town of N, meeting local officials and various landowners to purchase “dead serfs.” His bizarre antics make him known as a millionaire and, for a time, he is hailed as the town’s darling; however, when the truth about his purchase of serfs is revealed due to unexpected emotions and a mistake, he ends up fleeing the town of N.
The landowners Chichikov meets each represent a distinct personality. Examples include the sentimental Manilov, who is steeped in romanticism and Eurocentrism and has cut himself off from reality; the cantankerous, hypocritical, and selfish Korobochka; Sobakevich, who has amassed wealth in the Russian style but is greedy; and Plyushkin, who is consumed by compulsive collecting and suspicion. With the exception of Nozdrov, who is a braggart and a gambler, Chichikov generally succeeds in purchasing serfs from them.
Local officials are also extensively involved in the process of purchasing serfs. Impressed by Chichikov’s eloquence, appearance, and social graces, they mistake him for a wealthy and cultured man and assist him without realizing that the serfs he is purchasing are, in fact, dead.
Chichikov is invited to a ball hosted by the governor, and just before the event, he receives a sentimental love letter. He resolves to find the letter’s author at the ball, but the ladies of high society surround him, vying for his attention. Amidst this, he catches sight of a sixteen-year-old girl he had previously seen by chance at the Sobakevich estate and is completely captivated by her. The ladies’ jealousy and attacks begin, and the situation dramatically worsens when Nozdryov appears drunk and exposes that all the serfs Chichikov has purchased are dead.
After Korobochka reveals the fact that he bought dead serfs, rumors and fantasies about Chichikov’s true identity spread uncontrollably throughout N City. The officials attempt to interpret this in connection with various criminal cases or conspiracies, and some even compare him to a counterfeiter or a figure like Napoleon. Ultimately, the district prosecutor dies of a heart attack caused by the shock, but the other officials and noblewomen quickly return to their former lives as long as no new incidents arise.
Amid this commotion, Chichikov quietly leaves N City. In the final chapter of the work, the author recounts Chichikov’s life from his childhood and concludes with a lyrical digression on the “sublime path” of Lucy.

Synopsis of Volume 2

Volume 2 begins some years later with Chichikov, now slightly older but more refined in his speech and manner, purchasing a deceased serf from a landowner with the same objective. The landowners he encounters are each revealed to have distinct personalities and lifestyles: the young landowner Tentetnikov, who harbors liberal ideals but lacks the will to act or effective strategies, making him indolent; General Betryshev, a hero of the 1812 War who is arrogant and ostentatious; the vigorous landowner Petukh, who devotes his life’s energy to preparing food and enjoying nature;
Kostanzoglo, who manages his estate judiciously in accordance with Russian nature and social institutions; Renichin, a St. Petersburg landowner hostile to him; Khlobuev, who imitates Western aristocratic culture to the letter only to fall into ruin and sell his estate; and Colonel Kosikaryov, who blindly introduces Western bureaucracy and Enlightenment ideals, thereby devastating his estate.
Chichikov succeeds in purchasing the estates of deceased serfs from Tentetnikov, Vetryshev, and Renichin, and borrows 10,000 rubles from Kostanzoglo to buy Hlobuev’s fertile estate at a bargain price. He then goes so far as to commit fraud by forging the will of Hlobuev’s aunt, Hanasarova, to seize a massive inheritance. During this process, he dreams of establishing himself as a respectable landowner after observing Kostanzoglo’s estate management methods, and resolves to live a simple life of repentance in the countryside after hearing religious admonitions from Murazov, a state monopoly merchant. However, due to the schemers and temptations around him, he slips back into a life of sin.
Meanwhile, Khlyubov acts on Murazov’s advice to travel the provinces collecting donations for church construction, while Murazov engages in serious discussions with the young duke, the governor, about Christian methods of governance. The governor summons local officials and judges, threatening to deal with their corruption and injustice through military-style trials, and beforehand demonstrates a resolve to remain faithful to his own duties and mission.

Themes and Formal Characteristics of the Work

Two Narrative Layers—Depiction of Vulgar Reality and Lyrical Digressions

In Volume 1 of ‘Dead Souls’, the author juxtaposes two narrative layers: the unfolding of the plot and the narrator’s lyrical digressions. These lyrical digressions are organically linked to the plot while broadly addressing a variety of themes. For example, Chapters 2 through 6 consist of reflections on the types of landowners Chichikov encounters; Chapter 3 is an ironic celebration of the nuances of the Russian language; Chapter 7 offers a serious contemplation of the literary scene and the writer’s fate; Chapter 11 explains the differences in ways of loving Russia; and the depiction of Lucy’s sublime identity and future role, the narrator’s emotions are revealed across a broad spectrum, ranging from sublime lyricism to ironic satire. Through this, insights into contemporary reality and a passion for the realization of ideals are conveyed together.

‘Dead Souls’—The Death of the Soul and the Ambiguity of the Literal Meaning

The title of the work, ‘Dead Souls,’ is ambiguous. Literally, it refers to a dead serf, while spiritually, it signifies the state of a dead soul in a vulgar human being. The anecdote that the title was once changed to “Chichikov’s Travels, or The Dead Soul” during censorship before reverting to the original demonstrates this dual meaning. Gogol borrowed Christian metaphor to satirically refer to humans whose bodies are alive but whose souls are dead as “dead souls” or “living corpses.” The title combines this with the literal plot in which Chichikov exploits the loopholes in the system—specifically, the practice in Tsarist Russia of referring to serfs as “souls” and the problem of the poll tax that landowners had to bear due to serfs who died between censuses held every 7 to 10 years—to carry out his fraudulent schemes.

Vulgar Desires and a Vulgar Society

Gogol believed that the vulgarity of the external environment and the vulgar desires within human beings interacted to cause the corruption of both the individual and society. The Western-style culture of hedonism and the bureaucratic culture spreading from St. Petersburg contaminated local landowners, bureaucrats, upper-class ladies, the urban masses, and even the serfs on the estates, spreading vulgarity.
Gogol did not view the root of these problems as lying solely in the institutions themselves, but rather in the vulgar desires of the people who operate them. Therefore, he emphasizes that the path to curing society’s ills requires not only institutional reform but also the spiritual self-purification and growth of the individual.

Human Ambivalence and the Possibility of Redemption

Through the characters’ journeys of transformation, Gogol demonstrates that humans possess both good and vulgar aspects simultaneously, and that everyone has the potential for redemption and transformation. Chichikov, as his name Pavel suggests, appears to be a reversal of the Apostle Paul; however, through his dedication to ideals, indomitable will, multifaceted talents, and patience forged through trials, he possesses the potential to become a propagator of truth like the Apostle Paul if he turns toward the good. In Volume 2, he comes close to redemption but falls back into corruption due to external temptations and his own lack of willpower; however, Gogol reveals that he had planned for Chichikov to ultimately walk the path of redemption. Furthermore, characters from Volume 1—such as Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdryov, and Plyushkin—also react with bewilderment to Chichikov’s words, suggesting that a common ethical principle and room for redemption exist within them. Sobakevich, though superficially selfish, possesses a steadfast and honest Russian way of life that is superior to that of Westernized figures.

A Blueprint for Russia’s Future

Through Volumes I and II, Gogol addresses Western-style modernization as a cultural malady facing contemporary Russia. He did not outright criticize autocracy or serfdom itself, but rather warned of the danger that institutions imported from the West, when blindly applied to Russian reality, could stimulate base human desires and devastate society. While he believed certain elements of bureaucracy and the underlying structure of institutions could be accepted, he viewed the blind adoption of modern human-centered values and horizontal social principles as contrary to truth and potentially harmful to the system. Gogol’s aim was not merely institutional criticism, but social improvement through the purification of the human soul and moral responsibility.

The Path for Russia Proposed by Gogol

In the second volume of ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol sought to present, alongside individual salvation, an alternative for the purification and transformation of Russian social institutions. His aim was not to blindly imitate Western institutions or ideas, but to seek a path for developing the economy and manufacturing in an indigenous manner rooted in Russia’s natural environment and agricultural traditions.
To this end, through the character of Kostanzoglo, a landowner from the South, Gogol cautions against the uncritical adoption of the Western liberal economic system and proposes a sustainable development model that preserves Russia’s land and agricultural culture. At the same time, through characters such as Murazov and the Young Duke, he sought to present an ideal of autocratic rule—where the Tsar is regarded as God’s representative—a patriarchal agrarian economy in which landowners care for their serfs like fathers, and an honest and fair bureaucracy, as alternatives to democracy or socialism.
Culturally, by contrasting positive figures like Kostanzoglo and Vasily with negative ones like Khlyubov, the author advocated for culture and the arts rooted in Russian rural culture and Christian traditions over the hedonistic salon culture of the Western aristocracy or modern popular culture. Furthermore, through the character of Tentetnikov, he displayed a certain degree of acceptance toward both the liberal tendencies represented by the Decembrists and the Russian patriotism symbolized by the 1812 Patriotic War.
The “Russian Way” described by Gogol is characterized by a strong tendency to select only the spiritually and ethically positive aspects from among elements of the modern and pre-modern eras, as well as those of Europe and Russia. However, the author himself felt that he had failed to clearly present this blueprint for Russia’s future in the second edition of Volume 2.

Apocalyptic View of History and the Repetition of Catastrophe

Gogol’s historical consciousness possesses religious and mythological layers, combining the influence of Romanticism and Baroque culture with an Orthodox Christian faith that solidified personally after the 1840s. The Baroque apocalyptic worldview imbued in the stories his mother told him during his childhood became even clearer through his imagination and experiences, and from the 1840s onward, his understanding of the Book of Revelation and the end of the world came to occupy a central position in his thought.
His eschatological view of history culminates in the perspective that history moves in a straight line toward the moment of the apocalypse, with internal ruptures and fissures recurring throughout the process. This multi-layered structure manifests in nearly all of Gogol’s characters through the motif of the sudden occurrence of extraordinary events and the resulting abrupt shifts in fate.
In his works of the 1830s, Gogol, following Baroque and Romantic, past-oriented eschatology, viewed modern people as more susceptible to the devil’s temptations than their premodern counterparts. At that time, he often portrayed God as a transcendent being who was cruel and indifferent to human suffering, or as a secret judge of justice who did not reveal his true identity, while the devil was depicted as a being who intervened directly and relentlessly in human fate.
During this period, it is difficult to find instances where misfortune is transformed into happiness through divine intervention. With the exception of a few early Romantic fairy tales, the devil’s influence is prominent in his works, while visible divine intervention is almost entirely absent.
In contrast, after the 1840s, in works written after Gogol had further solidified his personal faith, characters began to appear who overcame the devil’s influence and achieved the purification of the soul. Cases in which God intervenes within the ordinary order to encourage good will and guide people toward salvation gradually increased.
In particular, in ‘Dead Souls’, the process of God repeatedly intervening in the form of extraordinary events to awaken dormant souls is repeated. In Book I, while the crude bureaucrats and landowners of N City flee from terror and return to their daily lives, the district prosecutor internalizes the shock in his soul and dies.
In Book II, the characters experience successive divine interventions as they proceed toward their common destination: the stage of judgment. The sudden twists of fate that befall Tentetnikov, Chichikov, and Khlyubov, along with their reactions to them, reveal Gogol’s eschatological perspective.
The image of political leaders during this period takes the form of authoritative rulers who, as God’s representatives, embody both love and justice. The young duke who appears in the final chapter, much like the invisible prosecutor in ‘The Inspector General’, summons bureaucrats to appear before him, serving as a harbinger of God’s righteous judgment in the human world.