Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls (In-Person)

Nikolai Gogol is one of the most important yet most enigmatic writers in the Russian literary canon. As Fyodor Dostoyevski famously proclaimed: the entirety of modern Russian literature “emerged from under Gogol’s cloak.” Despite this centrality, Gogol was unique among his 19th century peers for the dark, humorous, and surreal tones struck in his fiction—perhaps nowhere more evident than in his unfinished novel Dead Souls, a comedic masterpiece that tells the story of a fabulous con and, at the same time, of a feudal society both corrupt and ridiculous. In contrast to his Romantic contemporaries, who sought to portray spiritual and moral transformation through individual heroic feats, Gogol zeroed in on all things inexplicable, unpleasant, disturbing, and bizarre—in short, on the “grotesque.” His literary universe spanning the whole of the Russian empire, from the provincial backwaters to the imperial capital, Gogol’s satires ask: how absurd does life become in a multi-confessional, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic state that demands conformity and uniformity from its manifold subjects? And about the underclasses, the undesirables: what does it mean to belong to a minority? What does it mean to be perceived as “grotesque”? And what, on the other hand, is the substance and purport of dignity and social respectability?

In this course, we will read widely across Gogol’s best known works, including Dead Souls as well as shorter works of fiction such as The Nose and The Overcoat, taking satire and the grotesque as lenses onto our exploration of Gogol’s Russia, its political and heterogeneous social realities. Both with and against the fictions, we will also examine Gogol’s political writings—texts that can seem at odds with his surprisingly modern literary techniques and the political positions ostensibly put forth in the fictions. Hailed equally as a champion of Russia’s downtrodden and advocate of both tsar and empire, what are we to make of Gogol’s oddly ambiguous body of work? Are satire and the grotesque inherently political literary modes? Is alienation from an unjust society a virtue or a vice? Can we trust our own sense of what justice is? Is reason more clarifying than absurdity? And what does it mean to conform with or subvert the expectations of a state that asks its subjects to serve its own needs and ends?

“Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls” will also run online on Wednesdays, starting November 13th. For more information and to enroll, please visit the course page. 

Course Schedule

Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
November 14 — December 12, 2024
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Thursday, November 28th

$335.00

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