Comparison Essay on “Dead Souls” and “Taras Bulba”

I. The abundant achievement of prose of the XIX century (from the 1840s to the 1890s) was Russian Realism, which is delineated by many broad Russian generators and Nikolai Gogol is non the last in this list. It is often mentioned that after 1830 Pushkin glum more and more to prose, although being the great poet of the time. However, the generator who established re everyy innovating newfangledistic and narrative tradition in Russian literary culture was Gogol. Gogols example, combined with the determinate literary pronouncements of the greatest literary critic of the period, V. G. Belinsky, be prose to be the literary medium of the future. Later, the great Russian smartist (and not the worst philosopher of religious thought) Dostoevsky defy tell, referring to himself and his young buck Realists, We afford all come disclose from infra Gogols Overcoat (meaning the famous story by Gogol, Shynel or Overcoat).Vladimir Nabokov highly esteemed Gogol as a great Russian (in no case Ukrainian, he is sure, in spite of the fact that Nikolaj Gogol-Ianovski originates from Ukraine, Mirgorod, and his ball outlook is apparently marked by Ukrainian national tradition) figmentist, dramatist, satirist, and wear out of the so-called critical reality in Russian literature, high hat-known for his novel Mertvye Dushy (1842, on the spur of the moment Souls). Praising the fanciful power and linguistic playfulness of the writers latest considers (Shynel or Overcoat, Mertvye Dushy etc), Nabokov states that Gogol is anything but the sentimentalist folklore novelist.Actually, there can be defined dickens principal(prenominal) periods in Gogols opus worldly-minded romantic and argot nouslism of the Ukrainian past times (which we reckon in Evenings on a rear burn down Dikanka and Taras Bulba) and the next evolutionary period of fashion subject urban life reflection with all its mental abnormality and deviations. If to believe Nabokov, in the mature hop on Gogol was ashamed of the playful artificialness of his early plant life and as for the famous Russian critic, it is a dreadful incubus even to imagine Gogol scribbling Ukrainian folkloristic novels volume by volume Had he chosen this path, the world would have never heard his name. So, lets comparability these two antagonenistic periods of Gogols writing fit to the most vividly representative compute ats of his Taras Bulba and Dead Souls.II. Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, the keep back of Ukrainian folklore stories, which appeared in 1831-32, was Gogols breakthrough work (Gogol had greatly admired Pushkin, and he used in this work the same narrative device as Pushkin did in his Tales of Belkin). It showed his skill in mixing fantastic and deuced ideas of his lot with macabre, and at the same time he said nighthing crucial roughly the Russian and Ukrainian (ignoring Nabokovs imperialistic snobbism, it is important to mark Gogols Ukrainian roots) character. After f ailure as an assistance lecturer of world level at the University of St. Petersburg (1834-35), Gogol became a full-time writer. Under the title Mirgorod (1835) Gogol published a new collection of his stories, in any case inspired by Ukrainian vernacular culture, beginning with Old-World Landowners, which expound the decay of the anile way of life.The book also included the famous historical tale (poem in prose) Taras Bulba, which according to many literary critics showed the influence of W.Scott and L.Stern. However, it is kinda ignorant not to take into account the pilot Ukrainian novelistic tradition, which is widely based on folklore (Gulak-Artemovski, Kvitka-Osnovjanenko and many other writers of Ukrainian romanticism are manifestly folkloristic). The protagonist of Taras Bulba is a strong, heroic character, absolutely non-typical for Gogols later cavalcade of bureaucrats, lunatics, swindlers, and losers, numerously represented on the pages of Dead Souls.In 1569, regul ation over the right-coast Ukraine passed to Poland. The Polish lords (lyahy) promptly tried stamping out Ukrainian culture by savagely exploiting the peasantry, outlawing the Ukrainian wording and imposing Catholicism (Unia) and Papal command on the Orthodox creation. In response, Ukrainian manly peasants flocked to occasion the military groups known as the Cossacks. They founded the Zaporizhian Sitch on the Hortycya Island.The Cossacks, essentially a wild cross amidst mercenary crusaders and highwaymen,became the focus of resistance to the Poles, the Turks and the Crimean Tatars. Gogols novel tells the story of the old and wise warrior Taras Bulba who, with his sons Ostap and Andrij, sallies forth to join the Sitch. Gogols incontestably romantic adventure was as much a propaganda piece for his own time as an lament for a way of life that had passed. In Taras Bulba we meet conservative Gogol, who has just arrived to Petersburg and is not yet in advance(p) in the city life. He is shocked by the corruption and moral decay of the city dwellers. He craves for the Golden Age of his peoples history and this age, he thinks, was the glorious times of the Zaporizhian Sitch.Taras Bulba is a remarkable example of the early romantic Gogol (if to call Gogol the writers texts). However, this novel works on both levels (historical and pshycological, more typical for the later Gogols works) and is certainly one of the most exciting masterpieces in world literature.Set sometime between the mid- six-spotteenth and early-seventeenth century, Gogols heroic tale recounts both a bloody Cossack drive against the Poles (led by the bold Taras Bulba of Ukrainian folk mythology) and the trials of Taras Bulbas two sons. As Robert Kaplan (translator) writes, Taras Bulba has a Kiplingesque sapidity . . . that makes it a pleasure to read, but central to its al-Qaeda is an unredemptive, darkly evil violence that is far beyond anything that Kipling ever touched on. We need more works like Taras Bulba to better understand the emotional wellsprings of the curse we face today in places like the place East and Central Asia. (Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell p.18).And the critic rear end Cournos has noted, A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critics observation about Gogol Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so virtuoso(prenominal) in portraying all that is unromantic in life.(The Rise of Prose Nikolai Gogol). But this statement does not pass the whole ground, for it is easy to see in intimately all of Gogols work his free Cossack case-by-case trying to break through the wall of aristocratic and non-heroic today like some ancient demon, essentially Dionysian. So, through the years, this novel sounds at once as a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever vocation for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us.This wide indication lies far beyond previously often-uttered accusation of vernacular populist romantic ism. Nikolai Gogol searched for the joy and sadness in the Ukrainian songs he loved so much. Ukrainian was to Gogol the language of the soul, and it was in Ukrainian songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that he read the history of his people. So, here in this novel the writers use is not the historical but rather the psychological picture of his people. so no one (even Nabokov) has the right to accuse Gogol of Ukrainian culture profanation as if following the advanced(a) literary trend of his time.Indeed, so great was his enthusiasm for his own land that after collecting literal for many years, the year 1833 finds him at work on a history of poor Ukraine, a work planned to take up six volumes and writing to a friend at this time he promises to show much in it that has not been said before him. However, Gogol never wrote either his history of lesser Russia (Malorosiya) or his universal history, he didnt get down Ukrainian Balzac but is often called Ukrainian Goffman or Poe.Apart from several legal brief studies not always reliable, the resultant of his many years application to his scholarly projects was this brief epic in prose, Homeric in conceit (The Rise of Prose Nikolai Gogol). The sense of intense living, living hazardously to cite Nietzsche the recognition of courage as the greatest virtue, the God in man, inspired Gogol, living in times which tended toward grey monotony, with admiration for his more well-off forefathers, who lived in a poetic time, when everything was won with the sword, when every one in his turn strove to be an participating being and not a spectator. In Taras Bulba we find the people of action, and Dead Souls gives us the gallery of people of things.Russia Russia I see you now, from my wondrous, beautiful past I behold you How wretched, dispersed and uncomfortable everything is about you(Nikolai Gogol)III. Gogol began work on Dead Souls in 1835. The plot and the main idea of the story was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin who seemed to have soundless Gogol as a writer quite well. Pushkin mat that the idea of a man travelling all over the Russian Impire grease ones palmsing up the self-control rights to serfs who had died (mertvye dushy) would allow Gogol to make at once the literary success. In fact, it was an opportunity to introduce a raft of characters, varied settings, mountains of detail, and the scope within which to be able to elaborate the anecdotal story of the work to his hearts cognitive content and to reveal all the sins of his contemporary. Gogol had big ideas of becoming a scriptor of his age a sort of BalzacFor the next six years, he devoted almost all of his creative energy to Dead Souls. His compulsive craftsmanship is lucid in that the entire work was revised at least five times the author state that some passages had been rewritten as many as twenty times. He felt that this novel should be his best one.Unfortunately, only the in troductory part of Dead Souls, twelve chapters in all, was completed by Gogol. The second part, as we know it, (some chapters of which are often published with the first part) is a recreation from various sources of what Gogol might have done with the continuation of his work. Influenced by the fanatical priest Father Konstantinovskii, he burned what he truly had al put up written for the second part of the novel just nine days before his death.The accompaniment from which the novel develops is based upon a scheme which theoretically was possible in Gogols day. The politics had a insurance policy of lending money to landholders, feeling that this class was its strongest support. Lands owned, however, were thrifty not in acres, but by the itemize of souls (serfs, or here, mertvye dushy) residing on them. De facto, landowners were serf owners The government was ready to accept the land (that is, the serfs) of an individual as related for a loan. Thus, a method was required by which the holdings of an individual landowner could be established at any given time.This method stated that an individual possessed the number of souls recorded as such that belong to him/her in the most recent population census. The census was taken every ten years, which meant that near the end of the ten-year cycle almost every landowner would have some serfs who were not recorded in the preceding census because they had recently been born, and some serfs mum recorded even though they had died long ago since the last census. In Dead Souls, the main character, Chichikov, schemes to subvert from the serf holders a number of those souls who had died but were keep mum counted as living until the next census. An absurd fact becomes possible knackered souls are sold as being alive people, which ar estil able to work. Its audacious at the price.A rogue would cheat you, sell you some worthless rubbish instead of souls, but exploit are as juicy as matured nuts, all picked they are all either craftsmen or sturdy peasants, Sobakievich boasts to his weird buyer (Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich). Once Chichikov had a number of such souls, he would apply to the government bank for a loan, using the souls as his collateral. With this low-interest loan in hand he would then buy and work an actual country estate, eventually stipendiary back the loan and purchasing living souls to work the land. Well, passing the whole plot, it is imporatnt to state Gogols idea of small marginal people actually decaying in their small towns and farms. The Russia of small towns is the country of odd and irreversibly narrow-minded people. What Gogol proves is that these small landowners are actually dead They have burried themselves alive in their dirty rotted flea-bitten houses.Contrudicting the wide-sprea yet contested idea of Gogols evolution as a writer, it is possible to say that either completing histoical heroic plot or conveying contemporary decayed society, Gogols intention stays the same to show the depth of a human soul and how this soul can be filled with live brightness of heroism or by dead wickedness and miserable oddity. Bibliography Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich. Taras Bulba and some other Tales. Electronic textual matter Center, University of Virginia Library// http//etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/GogTara.htmlNikolay Gogol Text and Context, ed. by Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell (1989).N. V. Nabokov Nicolai Gogol, 1944.The Rise of Prose Nikolai Gogol// http//www1.umn.edu/lol-russ/hpgary/Russ3421/lesson6.htm