Smirnov’s essay is devoted to an episode from Gogol’s Dead Souls [Myortvye dushi]; rather a landscape than an episode. In Gogol’s opinion, a landscape is not a copy of nature but an artist’s creation. A landscape is meant to be created, not copied from nature: the role of a master craftsman is not to usher the viewer along the trimmed bosquets of a French formal garden, unsurprising and immediately recognisable, but to lure them into the thicket of his imagination. It is with such a fruit of imagination that we are faced in the case of the neglected, unruly and overgrown garden on the landowner Plyushkin’s estate. The author examines Gogol’s description of the garden in detail, almost word by word, uncovering the hidden symbolic meaning of contrasting the village, ugly in its state of neglect, with the landowner’s garden, equally neglected but beautiful nonetheless. What is piles of rubbish in the village streets becomes pretty fallen leaves on the garden paths; the author suggests that Gogol used this contrast to let nature ‘correct’ the gardener, i. e. to remove the incompetent human alterations and reveal itself in its full glory.