Dead Souls

“ How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis. ”

“ With the usual inconsistency of mythical belief, the souls of the dead are spoken of, at other times, as if they inhabited a spiritual world, sometimes a paradise of flowers, sometimes a gloomy place, which mortal men may visit, but whence no one can escape who has tasted of the food of the ghosts. ”

“ There is no sense in dead souls, how can one buy dead souls? Who would be such a fool as to accept them? And queer sort of money one would pay for them! And to what purpose, to what use could dead souls be put? And why is the governor's daughter mixed up in it? If he wanted to elope with her, why should he buy dead souls? If he wanted to buy dead souls, why should he run away with the governor's daughter? Does he want to make her a present of these dead souls or what? What nonsensical stories they do spread about the town. ”

“ The belief in ghosts did not help me any; for that ghost and spirit were synonyms, never once struck my mind. To the innumerable questions propounded by me to my elders, in the expectation of eliciting satisfactory replies, the old stereotyped response was given,—to wit: Mankind have souls, and these souls live when the body is dead and returned into the dust of the ground; but what the soul was, whence it came, what was its nature, form, shape and size, and whither it went after the loss of its body, I could gain not the slightest information ”

“ On his answers to these three questions hangs the fate of the ghost. If he left much money, he is free to enter the realm of bliss, where he will pass the time with other happy souls smoking and eating and enjoying other sensual delights. But if he left little or no money, he is banished the earthly paradise and sent home to roam like a wild beast in the forest, battening on leaves and filth. With bitter sighs and groans he prowls about the villages at night and seeks to avenge himself by scaring or plaguing the survivors. ”

“ But the souls of the dead were also believed to return from the spirit land for other purposes than to be born again in the flesh. They might come as ghosts to haunt and torment the living, and as such they were greatly dreaded by the people. ”

“ He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him
How could that be—I thought the dead were souls,
He broke my trance. Don’t that make you suspicious
That there’s something the dead are keeping back?
Yes, there’s something the dead are keeping back. ”

“ Wherever it may be, the land of souls is divided into compartments; people who have died of sickness or witchcraft go to one place, and people who have been killed in battle go to another. They do not go unattended; for when a man dies two friends sleep beside his corpse the first night, one on each side, and their spirits are believed to accompany the soul of the dead man to the spirit land. ”

“ Again, the soul of a man's dead father or friend may bear him company on a journey and, like the beryl-stone in Rossetti's poem Rose Mary, warn him of an ambuscade lurking for him in a spot where the man himself sees nothing. But the spirits of the dead do not always come with such friendly intent; they may drive the living distracted; a peculiar form of mental excitement and bewilderment is attributed to their action. Further, these aborigines at Cape Bedford, in Queensland, believe that all spirits of nature are in fact souls of the dead. ”

“ There is a bleating demon who makes fun of them, cloudy giants who stir up thunderstorms, and are afraid only of St. Barbara, witches who cast the evil eye, but most of all the "souls in pain." For oftentimes the dead come back to earth for their purgatorial penance. You must never slam a door, nor close a window roughly, nor kick the smallest pebble from your path, because in door or stone or 446 window may be a suffering soul. To see one is to die within the year. If you would not be haunted by your dead, kiss the shoes which the body wears to the burial. ”

“ And the flower-souls answered, making fragrant all the white streets of the white city of the dead:—
"We are the offerings of love bereaved to the All-loving,—the sacrifices of the fatherless to the All-father. We know not of the dead,—the Infinite secret hath not been revealed to us; —we know only that they sleep under the eye of Him who never sleeps. ”

“ Thus the living had to herd the souls of the dead as they had their bodies in order that they themselves might be free and sane. This was a great achievement, which spiritists and psychic researchers tend to undo, for ghosts must be laid just as bodies must be buried and the decomposing souls that appear in seances are only less offensive to common sense than the mouldering bodies are to sense. ”

“ If that is so, it is obvious that the dead depend for their continued existence upon the recollection of the living; their names are in a sense their souls, so that oblivion of the name involves extinction of the soul.317 But though the spirits of the dead go away to live for a time on Mount Idu, they often return to their native villages and haunt the place of their death. ”

“ Such ghosts loiter for a long time about the places where they died, and they are very dangerous, because they are for ever luring other people to die the same death which they died themselves. Yet another troop of evil ghosts are the souls of those who were beheaded in battle ”

“ He explained as clearly as he could, and I learned from what he said that many believe that we have two souls, both divisible and material and yet both rational; one leaves the body at death, but remains, however, in the cemetery until the feast of the dead, after which it either is changed into a turtle-dove, or according to the more general belief, it goes immediately to the village of souls.
The other soul is attached to the body; it marks the corpse, as it were, and remains in the grave after the feast, never to leave it, "si ce n'est que quelqu'un l'enfante de rechef." ”

“ It was a wonderful thing to think for how many thousands of years the dead orb above and the dead city below had gazed thus upon each other, and in the utter solitude of space poured forth each to each the tale of their lost life and long-departed glory. The white light fell, and minute by minute the quiet shadows crept across the grass-grown courts like the spirits of old priests haunting the habitations of their worship—the white light fell, and the long shadows grew till the beauty and grandeur of each scene and the untamed majesty of its present Death seemed to sink into our very souls, and speak more loudly than the shouts of armies concerning the pomp and splendour that the grave had swallowed, and even memory had forgotten. ”

“ One must start from the beginning and not from the middle. If any one were to say to me: "Give me a hundred thousand and I'll get rich directly," I shouldn't believe him: he is counting on luck and not on a certainty. One must begin with a farthing.'
'In that case I shall get rich,' said Tchitchikov, 'because I am beginning almost, so to say, from nothing.' He meant, of course, his dead souls.
'Konstantin, it is time for Pavel Ivanovitch to rest and sleep,' said his wife, 'and you keep chattering.'
'And you will certainly get rich,' said Skudronzhoglo, not heeding his wife. ”

“ They believe that the souls of the dead occasionally visit the living and are seen by them, and that they haunt houses and burial-places. They are very much afraid of the ghosts and do all they can to drive or frighten them away. Above all, being cannibals, they stand in great fear of the ghosts of the people whom they have killed and eaten. The man who is cutting up a human body takes care to tie a bandage over his mouth and nose during the operation of carving in order to prevent the enraged soul of the victim from entering into his body by these apertures ”

“ So when a hare, startled by the beaters, darts out of the forest, the sportsman with his horse and his riding whip is suddenly like powder waiting for the match to be applied. He gazes into the murky air and is already with faultless aim striking at the beast, has already slain it, however the whirling snowy steppe may rise up against him, scattering silvery stars on his lips, his moustache, his eyes, his brows, and on his beaver cap.
'The dead souls ...' pronounced the lady agreeable in all respects.
'Well, well!' cried her visitor, all excitement. ”

“ Opinions as to the actual significance of Gogol's masterpiece differ. Some consider the author a realist who has drawn with meticulous detail a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him a great symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe the living of Russia as well as its dead. Chichikov himself is now generally regarded as a universal character. ”

“ But the comic in Dead Souls is merely external. Let us see how Pushkin, who loved to laugh, regarded the work. As Gogol read it aloud to him from the manuscript the poet grew more and more gloomy and at last cried out: "God! What a sad country Russia is!" And later he said of it: "Gogol invents nothing; it is the simple truth, the terrible truth." ”

“ Having done their business with the Governor's wife, the ladies' party descended upon the male section, with a view to influencing it to their own side by asserting that the dead souls were an invention used solely for the purpose of diverting suspicion and successfully affecting the abduction. ”

“ The ghosts of such persons continue their insignificance, and are nobodies after death as before; they are ghosts because all men have souls, and the souls of dead men are ghosts; they are dreaded because all ghosts are awful, but they get no worship and are soon only thought of as the crowd of the nameless population of the lower world."556
Ghosts of the great and of the recently dead are chiefly regarded. Supernatural power (mana) acquired through ghosts. ”

“ If the souls of former enemies met in the world beyond the grave, they renewed their battles, but apparently to no purpose, since they were accounted invulnerable in this invisible state. Again, when the soul of a dead wife arrived in the spirit land, it was known to the soul of her dead husband, if he had gone before, and the two renewed their acquaintance in a spacious house, called tourooa, where the souls of the deceased assembled to recreate themselves with the gods. ”

“ Like many other people, they seem to have wavered between a belief [Pg 315] that the souls of the dead lingered invisible near their old homes and the belief that the disembodied spirits went away to a distant land, where all human souls, which have departed this life, met and dwelt together. ”

“ And to keep the victim's ghost quiet while his body is being devoured, a cut from a joint is very considerately placed on a tree outside of the house, so that he may eat of his own flesh and be satisfied. At the conclusion of the banquet, the people shout, brandish spears, beat the bushes, blow horns, beat drums, and make all kinds of noises for the purpose of chasing the ghost or ghosts of the murdered and eaten men away from the village. But while they send away the souls, they keep the skulls and jawbones of the victims ”

“ Other and later types of such “banquets of the dead” show the dead person standing up (not infrequently by the side of a horse) or lying upon a couch and accepting the drink-offering made to him by the survivors.105 These reliefs allow us to see at what a distance the departed spirits are supposed to stand from the living: the dead do, indeed, seem now to be “better and stronger” beings; they are well on the road to becoming “Heroes”. ”

“ Further, the dramatic representation of the ghosts in a series of striking and impressive performances indicates how a sacred and in time a secular drama may elsewhere have grown out of a purely religious celebration concerned with the souls of the departed. ”

“ The poet Pushkin, who said of Gogol that "behind his laughter you feel the unseen tears," was his chief friend and inspirer. It was he who suggested the plot of Dead Souls as well as the plot of the earlier work The Revisor, which is almost the only comedy in Russian. The importance of both is their introduction of the social element in Russian literature, as Prince Kropotkin points out. Both hold up the mirror to Russian officialdom and the effects it has produced on the national character. The plot of Dead Souls is simple enough, and is said to have been suggested by an actual episode. ”

“ One reason why the men's party was so certain that the dead souls connoted something contrary to good order and discipline, was that there had just been appointed to the province a new Governor-General--an event which, of course, had thrown the whole army of provincial tchinovniks into a state of great excitement, seeing that they knew that before long there would ensue transferments and sentences of censure, as well as the series of official dinners with which a Governor-General is accustomed to entertain his subordinates. ”

“ Again, the ancestral images are often consulted to ascertain the cause of a death; and if the image attributes the death to the evil magic of a member of another tribe, an expedition will be sent to avenge the wrong by slaying the supposed culprit. For the souls of the dead take it very ill and wreak their spite on the survivors, if their death is not avenged on their enemies. ”

“ One might indeed go further and say that it implies a certain tolerance of one's characters even though they be, in the conventional sense, knaves, products, as the case might be, of conditions or circumstance, which after all is the thing to be criticised and not the man. But pity and tolerance are rare in satire, even in clash with it, producing in the result a deep sense of tragic humour. It is this that makes of Dead Souls a unique work, peculiarly Gogolian, peculiarly Russian, and distinct from its author's Spanish and English masters. ”