Shults S. Gogol’s poem in prose ‘Dead Souls’ [‘Myortvye dushi’]: The inner world and literary-philosophical contexts

Abstract

This review is concerned with the critical analysis of S. Shults’s monograph Gogol’s Poem in Prose ‘Dead Souls’. It offers a detailed examination of the book’s methodology, which is partially founded in the hermeneutic approach and is similar to that of D. Likhachev, M. Bakh­tin’s concept of the ‘great time’, and the principles of comparative-historical method of literary research. S. Shults’s analysis of Gogol’s world is divided into three sections. The first focuses on mythopoetics, the third discusses the philosophical dimension of Gogol’s novel. The biggest of the three, the second section reveals the semblance of the novel’s key messages, topics and plots to the world’s classical heritage. However, the reviewer finds that the ‘closer contexts’ (Radishchev, Karamzin, Zhukovsky, and Novalis) appear more convincing than the ‘remote’ ones (Quevedo, Fielding, Heidegger).