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Dead Souls

Moscow, his entire possessions in a little bag; these consisted of pamphlets, critiques, and newspaper articles mostly inimical to himself. He wandered about with these from house to house. Everything he had of value he gave away to the poor. He ceased work entirely. According to all accounts he spent his last days in praying and fasting. Visions came to him. His death, which came in 1852, was extremely fantastic. His last words, uttered in loud frenzy, were: "A ladder! Quick, a ladder!" This call for a ladder—"a spiritual ladder," the words of Merejkovsky—had been made on an earlier occasion by a certain Russian saint, who used almost the same language. "I shall laugh my bitter laugh"[1] was the inscription placed on Gogol's grave.


  1. This is generally referred to in the Russian criticisms of Gogol as a quotation from Jeremiah. It appears upon investigation, however, that it actually occurs only in the Slavonic version from the Greek, and not in the Russian translation made direct from the Hebrew.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Evenings on the Farm near the Dikanka, 1829-31; Mirgorod, 1831-33; Taras Bulba, 1834; Arabesques (includes tales, The Portrait and A Madman's Diary), 1831-35; The Cloak, 1835; The Revizor (The Inspector-General), 1836; Dead Souls, 1842; Correspondence with Friends, 1847.

English Translations: Cossack Tales (The Night of Christmas Eve, Tarass Boolba), trans, by G. Tolstoy, i860; St. John's Eve and Other Stories, trans, by Isabel F. Hapgood. New York, Crowell, 1886; Taras Bulba: Also St. John's Eve and Other Stories, London, Vizetelly, 1887; The Inspector: a Comedy, Calcutta, 1890; The Inspector-General, trans, by A. A. Sykes, London, 1892; Revizor, trans, for the Yale Dramatic Association by Max S. Mandell, New Haven, Conn., 1908; Home Life in Russia (adaptation of Dead Souls), London, Hurst, 1854; Tchitchikoff's Journeys; or Dead Souls, trans, by Isabel F. Hapgood, New York, Crowell, 1886; Dead Souls, London, Vizetelly, 1887; Dead Souls, London, Maxwell, 1887; Meditations on the Divine Liturgy, trans, by L. Alexeieff, London, A. R. Mowbray and Co., 1913.

Lives, etc.: (Russian) Kotlyarevsky (N. A.), 1903; Shenrok (V. I.), Materials for a Biography, 1892; (French) Leger (L.), Nicholas Gogol, 1914.