ABSTRACT This paper reinterprets Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls as a metaphysical case study rather than a historical satire. Through grotesque form, satirical estrangement, and symbolic repetition, Gogol dramatizes the erosion of ethical selfhood in a world governed by bureaucracy, civility, and spiritual inertia. Rather than resolving the moral crisis, the novel enacts it, turning rituals, landscapes, and linguistic absurdity into a cartography of disconnection. Drawing on philosophical ethics, literary theory, and symbolic visualization, this study situates Dead Souls in dialogue with Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, and Nabokov, while tracing its resonances in contemporary mythic fiction. In doing so, it repositions Gogol’s work as a diagnostic narrative that reveals what happens when the soul becomes a ledger entry within a spiritually exhausted world.
Juraev et al. (Fri,) studied this question.