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

I. The huge achievement of prose of the XIX century (from the 1840s to the 1890s) was Russian Realism, which is represented by more commodious Russian authors and Nikolai Gogol is not the last in this list. It is often times menti wizd that afterwards 1830 Pushkin turned to a consider fitteder extent(prenominal) than and more to prose, although organism the sterling(prenominal) poet of the time. How perpetually, the writer who established re entirelyy innovating refreshfulistic and narrative customs duty in Russian literary elaboration was Gogol. Gogols example, combined with the authoritative literary pronouncements of the bullyest literary dilettante of the period, V. G. Belinsky, proved prose to be the literary medium of the future. Later, the great Russian novelist (and not the worst philosopher of religious thought) Dostoevsky beat verbalise, referring to himself and his fellow Realists, We throw both tally out from under Gogols Overcoat (meaning the renow ned story by Gogol, Shynel or Overcoat).Vladimir Nabokov modification esteemed Gogol as a great Russian (in no case Ukrainian, he is sure, in spite of the fact that Nikolaj Gogol-Ianovski originates from Ukraine, Mirgorod, and his instauration outlook is obviously reticked by Ukrainian national tradition) novelist, dramatist, satirist, and undercoater of the so-called critical realism in Russian literature, lift out-known for his novel Mertvye Dushy (1842, on the spur of the moment Souls). praise the imaginative power and linguistic witticism of the writers latest full treatment (Shynel or Overcoat, Mertvye Dushy etc), Nabokov states that Gogol is eachthing but the romantic fellowshiplore novelist.Actually, in that respect can be defined dickens briny periods in Gogols committal to writing conservative romantic and vernacular high-mindedness of the Ukrainian past (which we regard in Evenings on a resurrect climb up Dikanka and Taras Bulba) and the next evolutionar y period of mod urban life reflection with all its psychological abnormality and deviations. If to believe Nabokov, in the mature age Gogol was ashamed of the pixilated artificialness of his betimes wholly kit and boodle and as for the famous Russian critic, it is a d rakeful nightm atomic compute 18 even to imagine Gogol scribbling Ukrainian folkloristic novels tawdriness by volume Had he chosen this path, the phalanx personnel would capture never hear his name. So, lets comp be these two antagonenistic periods of Gogols writing synonymous to the most vividly representative invents of his Taras Bulba and Dead Souls.II. Evenings on a Farm tightfitting Dikanka, the book of Ukrainian folklore stories, which appeared in 1831-32, was Gogols breakthrough and through and through hit (Gogol had greatly esteem Pushkin, and he used in this work the same narrative device as Pushkin did in his Tales of Belkin). It showed his skill in coalesce fantastic and demonic judgements of his people with macabre, and at the same time he said something crucial about the Russian and Ukrainian (ignoring Nabokovs imperialistic snobbism, it is important to mark Gogols Ukrainian roots) character. After adversity as an assistant lecturer of world history at the University of St. Petersburg (1834-35), Gogol became a regular writer. Under the title Mirgorod (1835) Gogol published a new collection of his stories, also invigorate by Ukrainian vernacular horticulture, ascendant with Old-World Landowners, which described the decay of the one-time(prenominal)(a) way of life.The book also include the famous historical bilgewater (poem in prose) Taras Bulba, which according to many literary critics showed the work of W.Scott and L.Stern. However, it is alternatively ignorant not to murder into account the original Ukrainian novelistic tradition, which is astray based on folklore (Gulak-Artemovski, Kvitka-Osnovjanenko and many opposite writers of Ukrainian romanticism are manifestly folkloristic). The protagonist of Taras Bulba is a strong, heroic character, perfectly 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 right-coast Ukraine passed to Poland. The amplify lords (lyahy) promptly tried stamping out Ukrainian culture by savagely exploiting the peasantry, outlawing the Ukrainian language and imposing Catholicism (Unia) and portentous supremacy on the Orthodox population. In response, Ukrainian male peasants flocked to join the military groups known as the Cossacks. They founded the Zaporizhian Sitch on the Hortycya Island.The Cossacks, essentially a wild cross amidst mercenary crusaders and highwaymen,became the focus of resistance to the Poles, the Turks and the Crimean Tatars. Gogols novel tells the story of the old and reckless warrior Taras Bulba who, with his sons Ostap and Andrij, sallies forth to join the Sitc h. Gogols incontestably romantic hazard was as more than a propaganda opus for his own time as an dirge for a way of life that had passed. In Taras Bulba we meet conservative Gogol, who has entirely arrived to Petersburg and is not yet sophisticated in the city life. He is shocked by the corruptness and moral decay of the city dwellers. He craves for the Golden Age of his peoples history and this age, he thinks, was the glorious quantify 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(prenominal) levels (historical and pshycological, more typical for the later Gogols works) and is surely one of the most kindle masterpieces in world literature.Set sometime between the mid- cardinalteenth and early-seventeenth century, Gogols epic tale recounts both a bloody Cossack drive back against the Poles (led by the bold Taras Bulba of Ukrainian folk mythology) and the tri als of Taras Bulbas two sons. As Robert Kaplan (translator) writes, Taras Bulba has a Kiplingesque gusto . . . that makes it a amusement to read, but central to its theme is an unredemptive, darkly evil violence that is far beyond anything that Kipling ever touched on. We need more works kindred Taras Bulba to better determine the emotional wellsprings of the threat we face like a shot in places like the Middle vitamin E and Central Asia. (Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell p.18).And the critic crapper Cournos has noted, A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critics observation about Gogol rarely has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life.(The burn up of Prose Nikolai Gogol). just now this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it is easy to see in approximately all of Gogols work his unaffectionate Cossack understanding trying to break through the wall of gloomy and non-heroic today l ike some ancient demon, essentially Dionysian. So, through the twelvemonths, this novel sounds at at once as a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever calling for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us.This wide interpretation lies far beyond previously often-uttered accusation of vernacular democrat 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 soul, 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 people. So, here in this novel the writers excogitation is not the historical but rather the psychological picture of his people. Hence no one (even Nabokov) has the right to accuse Gogol of Ukrainian culture profanation as if following the red-brick literary trend of his time.Indeed, so great was his enthusiasm for his own land that after collecting material for many years, the year 1833 finds hi m at work on a history of poor Ukraine, a work planned to take up six volumes and writing to a friend at this time he promises to say much in it that has not been said originally him. However, Gogol never wrote all his history of half-size Russia (Malorosiya) or his universal history, he didnt become Ukrainian Balzac but is often called Ukrainian Goffman or Poe.Apart from several draft studies not always reliable, the result of his many years application to his scholarly projects was this picture epic in prose, Homeric in mood (The Rise of Prose Nikolai Gogol). The sense of pictorial animateness, living dangerously to cite Nietzsche the knowledge of courage as the greatest virtue, the deity in man, inspired Gogol, living in times which tended toward grey monotony, with admiration for his more fortunate forefathers, who workd in a poetic time, when everything was won with the sword, when every one in his turn strove to be an active being and not a spectator. In Taras Bulba we find the people of action, and Dead Souls gives us the drift of people of things.Russia Russia I see you now, from my wondrous, lovely past I behold you How wretched, dot and uncomfortable everything is about you(Nikolai Gogol)III. Gogol began working on Dead Souls in 1835. The plot and the principal(prenominal) imagination of the story was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin who seemed to hand over understood Gogol as a writer quite well. Pushkin felt that the idea of a man travelling all over the Russian Impire buying up the self-possession rights to serfs who had died (mertvye dushy) would allow Gogol to make at once the literary success. In fact, it was an opportunity to adduce a multitude of characters, varied settings, mountains of detail, and the background within which to be able to elaborate the anecdotal story of the work to his hearts contented and to reveal all the sins of his contemporary. Gogol had big ideas of suitable a scriptor of his age a classify of Bal zacFor the next six years, he commit almost all of his creative sinew to Dead Souls. His compulsive craftsmanship is homely in that the entire work was revise at least five times the author verbalize that some passages had been re compose as many as twenty times. He felt that this novel should be his best one.Unfortunately, only the first part of Dead Souls, twelve chapters in all, was completed by Gogol. The second part, as we know it, (some chapters of which are often published with the first part) is a recreation from various sources of what Gogol might have done with the continuation of his work. Influenced by the fanatic priest Father Konstantinovskii, he ruin what he in reality had already written for the second part of the novel just nine days before his death.The feature from which the novel develops is based upon a connive which theoretically was contingent in Gogols day. The political relation had a policy of contributeing notes to landowners, feeling that thi s class was its strongest support. Lands owned, however, were measured not in acres, but by the procedure of souls (serfs, or here, mertvye dushy) residing on them. De facto, landowners were serf owners The giving medication was ready to accept the land (that is, the serfs) of an private as collateral for a bestow. Thus, a method was required by which the holdings of an someone landowner could be established at any given time.This method stated that an individual possessed the number of souls put down as such(prenominal) that belong to him/her in the most recent population numerate. The nose count was taken every ten years, which meant that near the end of the ten-year cycle almost every landowner would have some serfs who were not record in the preceding census because they had recently 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 dead souls are sold as being alive people, which ar estil able to work. Its cheap at the price.A rogue would invention you, sell you some worthless scum instead of souls, but mine are as juicy as mellowed nuts, all picked they are all either craftsmen or sturdy peasants, Sobakievich boasts to his weird purchaser (Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich). Once Chichikov had a number of such souls, he would apply to the government assert for a loan, using the souls as his collateral. With this low-interest loan in hand he would wherefore buy and work an actual re everyday estate, eventually paying back the loan and purchasing living souls to work the land. Well, passing the whole plot, it is imporatnt to state Gogols idea of shrimpy marginal people actually decaying in their small towns and farms. The Russia of small towns is the bucolic of odd and irreversibly narro w-minded people. What Gogol proves is that these small landowners are actually dead They have burried themselves alive in their dirty dirty flea-bitten houses.Contrudicting the wide-sprea yet contested idea of Gogols evolution as a writer, it is possible to say that either complemental histoical heroic plot or imparting contemporary decayed society, Gogols intention stays the same to show the reason 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 otherwise Tales. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library// 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//www1.umn.edu/lol-russ/hpgary/Russ3421/lesson6.htm