Dead Souls
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Nikoli Gogol’s (Gaw-gol) stories tend to feature everyday people—with all their socially dysfunctional characteristics and attributes—to explore the depths of the human soul in the face of injustices created by social stratification. Gogol had a reputation among peers and readers as a “painter of reality.” Convinced that he had a messianic mission to save Russia, Gogol regarded his novel, “Dead Souls,” from which the following passage was taken, as the vehicle providence had provided for him to accomplish this mission. In a letter to a friend Gogol conjectured, “I see quite clearly, God’s holy will: such ideas are not humanly inspired. A man would never think of such a subject.”
“….while the troika either flew up a hillock or skimmed downhill again and along the undulating and slightly sloping highway, Chichikov did nothing but smile every time he was slightly thrown up on his leather cushions, for he was a great lover of fast driving. And pray, find me the Russian who does not care for fast driving? Inclined as he is to let himself go, to whirl his life away and send it to the devil, his soul cannot but love speed. For is there not a kind of lofty and magic melody in fast driving? You seem to feel some unknown power lifting you up and placing you upon its wing, and then you are flying yourself and everything is flying by: the milestones flying, merchants flying by on the boxes of their carriages, forests fly by on both sides of the road in a dark succession of firs and pines together with the sound of hacking axes and the cries of crows; the entire highway is flying none knows whither away into the dissolving distance; and there is something frightening in this rapid shimmer amid which passing and vanishing things do not have time to have their outlines fixed and only the sky above with fleecy clouds and a prying moon appears motionless.”