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

I. The great achievement of prose of the 9teen century (from the 1840s to the 1890s) was Russian Realism, which is delineated by galore(postnominal) great Russian sources and Nikolai Gogol is non the remainder in this list. It is a great deal mentioned that later on 1830 Pushkin inverted more than and more to prose, although existence the greatest poet of the clip. However, the writer who established actu on the whole(a)y innovating refreshedistic and autobiography tradition in Russian literary culture was Gogol. Gogols type, combined with the arrogant literary pronouncements of the greatest literary tyro of the period, V. G. Belinsky, proved prose to be the literary forte of the future. Later, the great Russian freshist (and not the lather philosopher of religious thought) Dostoevsky go through said, referring to himself and his fellow Realists, We turn all over all come turn out from beneath Gogols Overcoat (meaning the famous story by Gogol, Shynel or Ov ercoat).Vladimir Nabokov highly esteemed Gogol as a great Russian (in no case Ukrainian, he is sure, in arouse of the fact that Nikolaj Gogol-Ianovski originates from Ukraine, Mirgorod, and his world outlook is plainly marked by Ukrainian field tradition) storyist, dramatist, satirist, and launcher of the so-called dilettanteal reality in Russian literature, best-known for his novel Mertvye Dushy (1842, gone Souls). Praising the imaginative exponent and linguistic playfulness of the writers latest whole kit and caboodle (Shynel or Overcoat, Mertvye Dushy etc), Nabokov states that Gogol is everything still the amative folklore novelist.Actually, there can be defined two main periods in Gogols piece of writing conservative amorous and unwashed root wordlism of the Ukrainian aside (which we find in Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and Taras Bulba) and the undermentioned evolutionary period of modernistic urban heart reflection with all its psychological unregularity and deviations. If to believe Nabokov, in the mature geezerhood Gogol was ashamed of the playful artificialness of his early craps and as for the famous Russian critic, it is a dreadful nightmargon flat to sound off Gogol scribbling Ukrainian folkloristic novels majority by volume Had he chosen this path, the world would nurse never heard his name. So, lets compargon these two antagonistic periods of Gogols writing corresponding to the to the highest degree vividly representative works of his Taras Bulba and on the spur of the moment Souls.II. Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, the handwriting of Ukrainian folklore stories, which appeared in 1831-32, was Gogols breakthrough work (Gogol had greatly admired Pushkin, and he apply in this work the same narrative device as Pushkin did in his Tales of Belkin). It showed his aptitude in mixing fantastic and goddam judgements of his hatful with macabre, and at the same conviction he said each(prenominal)thing crucial well-n igh the Russian and Ukrainian (ignoring Nabokovs imperialist snobbism, it is important to mark Gogols Ukrainian roots) character.After failure as an assistant reader of world fib at the University of St. Petersburg (1834-35), Gogol became a full-time writer. Under the title Mirgorod (1835) Gogol produce a new collection of his stories, in like publicner inspired by Ukrainian vernacular culture, beginning with Old-World Landowners, which described the downslope of the ancient way of invigoration.The book besides included the famous diachronic rehearsal (poem in prose) Taras Bulba, which according to more literary critics showed the influence of W.Scott and L.Stern. However, it is rather ignorant not to take into account the original Ukrainian novelistic tradition, which is roomyly based on folklore (Gulak-Artemovski, Kvitka-Osnovjanenko and many other writers of Ukrainian romanticism are evidently folkloristic). The protagonist of Taras Bulba is a strong, talkative char acter, absolutely non-typical for Gogols later cavalcade of bureaucrats, lunatics, swindlers, and losers, numerously represented on the pages of Dead Souls.In 1569, dominion over the effective-coast Ukraine passed to Poland. The Polish lords (lyahy) promptly tried stamping out Ukrainian culture by savagely exploiting the peasantry, outlawing the Ukrainian dustup and imposing universality (Unia) and Papal supremacy on the Jewish-Orthodox population. In response, Ukrainian male peasants flocked to conglutination the military groups known as the Cossacks. They founded the Zaporizhian Sitch on the Hortycya Island.The Cossacks, essentially a wild carrefour between mercenary crusaders and highwaymen,became the focus of metro 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 elegy for a way of life that had passed. In Taras Bulba we meet conservative Gogol, who has honourable arrived to Petersburg and is not yet sophisticated in the metropolis life. He is shocked by the corruption and moral decay of the city dwellers. He craves for the Golden Age of his populations tale and this age, he thinks, was the illustrious clock 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 surely one of the well-nigh exciting masterpieces in world literature. direct sometime between the mid-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, Gogols large tale recounts both a all-fired Cossack revolt 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 gusto . . . that makes it a amusement to read, just now central to its theme is an unredemptive, in darkness evil violence that is far beyond anything that Kipling ever touched on. We need more works like Taras Bulba to better compreh stop over the emotional wellsprings of the threat we face forthwith in places like the Middle easterly and Central Asia. (Jane Grayson and belief Wigzell p.18). And the critic pot 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 masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life.(The Rise of Prose Nikolai Gogol).But this tale does not cover the whole ground, for it is mild to see in almost all of Gogols work his free Cossack sense trying to break through the wall of gloomy and non-heroic today like some ancient demon, essentially Dionysian. So, through the old age, this novel sounds at once as a reproac h, a protest, and a challenge, ever career for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us. This wide interpretation lies far beyond previously often-uttered accusation of vernacular populist romanticism.Nikolai Gogol searched for the joy and sadness in the Ukrainian songs he loved so much. Ukrainian was to Gogol the language of the mind, 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 large number. So, here in this novel the writers spirit is not the historical but rather the psychological fancy of his people. Hence no one (even Nabokov) has the right to accuse Gogol of Ukrainian culture desecration as if following the modern literary trend of his time.Indeed, so great was his ebullience for his own land that after roll up material for many years, the year 1833 finds him at work on a history of poor Ukraine, a work plotted to take up six volumes and writing to a friend at this time he prom ises to say much in it that has not been said before him. However, Gogol never wrote either his history of Little Russia (Malorosiya) or his universal history, he didnt mystify Ukrainian Balzac but is often called Ukrainian Goffman or Poe.Apart from several brief studies not always reliable, the result of his many years application to his scholarly projects was this brief epic in prose, Homeric in temper (The Rise of Prose Nikolai Gogol). The sense of intense animation, living dangerously to cite Nietzsche the recognition of bravery as the greatest virtue, the God in man, inspired Gogol, living in times which tended toward grey monotony, with admiration for his more prosperous forefathers, who ragingd in a poetic time, when everything was won with the sword, when every one in his turn strove to be an active be 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 wondrou s, beautiful last(prenominal) I behold you How wretched, dispersed and uncomfortable everything is about you(Nikolai Gogol)III. Gogol began working on Dead Souls in 1835. The plot and the main inclination of the story was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin who seemed to have mum Gogol as a writer instead well. Pushkin tangle that the idea of a man travelling all over the Russian Impire depraveing up the ownership rights to serfs who had died (mertvye dushy) would get Gogol to make at once the literary success. In fact, it was an opportunity to introduce a multitude of characters, varied settings, mountains of detail, and the scope at bottom which to be able to elaborate the anecdotic story of the work to his hearts content and to issue all the sins of his contemporary. Gogol had big ideas of becoming a scriptor of his age a sort of BalzacFor the conterminous six years, he devoted almost all of his creative energy to Dead Souls. His compulsive craftsmanship is evident in that t he entire work was revised at least five times the seed stated that some passages had been rewritten as many as twenty times. He felt that this novel should be his best one.Unfortunately, alone the first part of Dead Souls, cardinal chapters in all, was completed by Gogol. The wink part, as we know it, (some chapters of which are often published with the first part) is a delight from various sources of what Gogol might have make with the continuation of his work. Influenced by the fanatical non-Christian priest Father Konstantinovskii, he burned what he genuinely had al have written for the endorsement part of the novel just nine days before his death.The situation from which the novel develops is based upon a scheme which theoretically was possible in Gogols day. The government had a policy of adding money to property owners, contact that this class was its strongest support. Lands owned, however, were measured not in acres, but by the number of souls (serfs, or here, mer tvye dushy) residing on them. De facto, landowners were serf owners The government was ready to accept the land (that is, the serfs) of an soulfulness as collateral for a bestow. Thus, a system 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 save as much(prenominal) that belong to him/her in the most recent population census. The census was interpreted 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 late been born, and some serfs still recorded even though they had died long ago since the last census. In Dead Souls, the main character, Chichikov, schemes to buy from the serf holders a number of those souls who had died but were still counted as living until the next census.An absurd situation becomes possible at rest(predicate) s ouls are sold as being alive people, which ar estil able to work. Its moth-eaten at the price. A rogue would have it away you, sell you some worthless chalk instead of souls, but mine are as juicy as ripe(p) 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 imprecate for a loan, using the souls as his collateral.With this low-interest loan in hand he would thence buy and work an actual solid ground estate, eventually paying back the loan and purchasing living souls to work the land. Well, whirl the whole plot, it is imporatnt to state Gogols idea of down(p) marginal people actually decaying in their small towns and farms. The Russia of small towns is the surface area of odd and irreversibly narrow-minded people. What Gogol proves is that these small landowners are actually dead They have burried themselves alive i n their dirty smutty flea-bitten houses.Contrudicting the wide-sprea yet contested idea of Gogols evolution as a writer, it is possible to say that either complementary histoical heroic plot or conveyance of title contemporary decayed society, Gogols intention stays the same to show the shrewdness 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 other(a) Tales. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library// http// meshing.archive.org/web/20080517101149/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//lol-russ.umn.edu/hpgary/Russ3421/lesson6.htm