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On the Prospects for Democracy in the USSR
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18591 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
6,305 Words |
| Author
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Rolf H. W. Theen
Rolf H.W. Theen, professor of political science at Purdue
University, West Lafayette, Indiana, is the author of numerous
articles on Soviet domestic affairs. |
The present, violently separated from the past, promises only misfortune. To avoid these misfortunes in Russia by forcing her to take into account her ancient history--which was simply the result of her primitive character--such will henceforth be the thankless task, more useful than brilliant, of the men called upon to govern this country.
-THE MARQUIS DE CUSTINE (1839)
Almost a century and a half have passed since the publication of Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls, in which the author sought to reveal "the whole of Russia." Upon having listened to Gogol's reading of the first few chapters of this powerful satire on eighteenth-century Russian life, Alexander Pushkin, Russia's most celebrated poet, reportedly exclaimed: "O Lord! What a sad place our Russia is." And rightly so! Not only are the deceased serfs or "souls" that Gogol's Chichikov buys up in his money-making scheme literally dead but also all the other characters in his novel are devoid of any signs of moral, emotional, and spiritual life. Yet the first, satirical, and only complete part of the novel, as Gogol revealed in letters to his friends, was just "a pale phantom" of the "great epos" he planned to write, "the porch" of the "magnificent palace which I have decided to build."
The available evidence suggests that the author's plan called for a novel in three parts, similar to Dante's Divine Comedy, portraying the hell, purgatory, and heaven of life in Russia. At the same time, Gogol was confident that the creation of this great epos, "my first real piece of work," would not only "propel my name to the top" but also "finally solve the enigma of my existence." The fragment of the second part of Dead Souls shows that this part of the novel was, indeed, to be very different. Gogol here is concerned with beginning the gradual transformation of his caricatures into real individuals, who are capable of thinking and experiencing human emotions.
Part two of the novel, still heavily focused on Russia's shortcomings, was to be the focal point of Gogol's work, where the inner conflict between good and evil in man would be addressed. The third and final part of the novel never went beyond the planning stage. Its purpose was to have been to depict the spiritual regeneration of the "dead souls" and the rebirth of Chichikov as "a man with a true sense of value." In the final part of Gogol's work, the grotesque "monsters" of the first volume were to be transformed into "honorable and gentle men." If Chichikov, in the first part of Dead Souls, had served to point up "the shortcomings and vices
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