Dead Souls

The poem Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) is one of the most significant works of domestic and world literature. Initially, the author planned to create a three -volume, but the almost finished second volume was lost, only a few chapters in drafts were preserved, and the third volume was never written. The real edition included the full text of the first volume, the chapter from applications to the first one and the late edition of the unfinished second volume.
Dead Souls, the work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852), the genre of which the author himself designated as Poem , - one of the largest and most significant works of Russian literature. For the first time, the expression “Dead Souls” appeared in Gogol’s papers on October 7, 1835: In a letter to Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, he informed the poet that he followed the advice of writing a novel about the buyer of the dead peasants.
Work on the first volume lasted since mid -1835 . Until the fall of 1841, and already in December the manuscript entered the censorship committee. With the revised “Tale of Captain Kopeikin” and the changed name “Chichikov’s adventures, or dead souls” on May 21, 1842, first saw the light. Many connoisseurs of Gogol’s work found the picture of the surrounding reality he created too gloomy, but most instantly took the poem with enthusiasm.
Why is Dead Souls a poem? The point is not only about the poetic perfection of the Gogol text. Initially, Nikolai Vasilievich planned to create a three -volume in which Chichikov’s adventures, an outwardly well -meaning and ordinary gentleman of the middle hand, would only be a binding thread between the epic canvases of life to the modern author of Russia. The writer himself indicated in a letter to V. A. Zhukovsky of June 26, 1842 that the published part of the poem “... it seems to me similar to the porch attached by the provincial architect to the palace, which is conceived in colossal sizes ...”
until the end It was not possible to carry out a grandiose plan: the almost ready -made second volume was lost, only a few chapters in drafts were preserved, and the third volume was never written. The first one and the late edition of the unfinished second volume. The drawings used in the design are also of considerable interest. In 1901, the St. Petersburg publisher Adolf Fedorovich Marx carried out a luxurious illustrated edition of the poem. A large group of talented artists working on a single plan was involved in the work on him, the art critic Petr Petrovich Gnedich and painter Mechislav Mikhailovich Dalkevich led the creative team. The artists made 365 wonderful illustrations: V. A. Andreev, A.F. Afanasyev, V. I. Stestenin, M. M. Dalkevich, F. S. Kozachinsky, I. K. Mankovsky, N. V. Pirogov and E. P. Samokish-Sudkovskaya reproduced the household scenes of the work, N. N. Bazhin and N. N. Khokhryakhov performed landscapes, and N. S. Samokish-letters and vignettes