Notes by N. V. Gogol “To the 1st Part” of “Dead Souls”: Problems of Poetics and Textual Criticism

The main problem solved in the article was the issue of dating Gogol’s rough sketches with the author’s “working” title “To the 1st part.” For almost a hundred years, it was generally accepted that these sketches, related to the first volume of Dead Souls, were written after the publication of this volume in 1842. The arbitrary dating of the notes “To the 1st part” to 1845–1846 is refuted by numerous facts indicating that the images and motifs of the notes were “interspersed” by Gogol into the overall fabric of the poem. These references were first pointed out in 1987 by V. A. Voropaev, who dated the sketches to 1839–1840. New observations were added to the textual observations made by the researcher, allowing one to trace the evolution of the text. The author's intention, as it appears in the sketches, is also analyzed along with the means by which it is realized in the poem. The combined data of textual criticism and poetics make it possible to clarify the dating of the notes, attributing them to the first months of 1841. The notes contain the author’s plan to express a broad educational meaning in the “gossip” and “idleness” of the city of N. in the first volume of the poem, endowing this the representation with an expression of a general “idleness” of the world. To realize this plan, Gogol planned to bring up several analogies to the “idle” life of “dead souls” in the poem, i.e., “to include all the similarities and introduce a gradual progression.” In the final text of the poem, such “similarities” were typologically “related” to gossip: fortune-telling “scientific reasoning”, predictions of false prophets and pseudo-spiritual literature. According to Gogol, all of them, taken in their totality, explain the numerous misconceptions of mankind in world history — following the “swamp lights”, “roads that lead far to the side.” Rumors about the Antichrist arising in the “emptiness” of the city suggest that in the final chapters of the first volume the writer depicts, as earlier in “The Government Inspector,” the pre-apocalyptic state of society, the approach of the last times — which for some, in fact, become the “last hour” (the death of the prosecutor).