Gogol statue

At the turn of the spring and summer of 1852, in a cold room in Moscow, a patient in his 40s forcibly threw a thick stack of manuscripts into the fire. With sadness and despair, he watched his blood dance with the flames.

This middle-aged man is the great Russian writer Gogol. The manuscript that has just been burned is the second volume of the novel "Dead Souls" (only the fragments are handed down).

Gogol, a Ukrainian, was born on April 1, 1809. At that time, Russia was in a period of gradual growth of capitalist economy and the gradual disintegration of feudal serfdom. The contradiction between the two aroused the struggle of revolutionaries (such as the Decemberists) and the general people against the tsarist rule. The brutal suppression of the Decemberists instead promoted Gogol's ideological progress. Poverty in the countryside and corruption in the official world made him determined to devote himself to the cause of literature. Pushkin's appreciation for him strengthened his willingness. In September 1831, the first part of "Night Talk with DiConka" was published, which raised the theme of good and evil, and the novel was full of poetic and picturesque. Gogol rose to prominence from then on. Then, the comedy "The Chancellor" shook the upper class of Petersburg and later became a world famous work. Later, he depicted the "Hundred Uglies" of the landlords and nobles in the backcountry, exposing the decay of serfdom. This is the first part of "Dead Souls" in 1842. The novel describes the story of Beggelkov, a speculator, buying the souls of dead serfs in various landlords' estates for profit, and displays galleries of portraits of landlords in other provinces of Russia, ruthlessly exposing and criticizing the Russian feudal serfdom system. It is the foundation work of Russian critical realism in the 199th century.

After the publication of "Dead Souls", Gogol lived abroad for six years. Since he was separated from the advanced domestic literary circles and was often surrounded by reactionary literati, his thoughts changed from criticizing serfdom to praising and defending it. He burned a part of the manuscript of the second part of "Dead Souls" that had already been written, and prepared to rewrite it, intending to write a positive image of the landlord class. His view was severely criticized by progressive artists. Gogol was also dissatisfied with the second draft of the second part of "Dead Souls" that he later wrote. He finally burned it before his death and passed away with extreme contradictions and pain.

Cover of the Chinese translation of Gogol's work "Dead Souls"