ething of
Chichikov in him, and who if he were to meet an acquaintance at that
moment, would not nudge his companion and say: "There goes Chichikov."
"And who and what is Chichikov?" The answer is: "A scoundrel." But
such an entertaining scoundrel, so abject, so shameless, so utterly
devoid of self-respect, such a magnificent liar, so plausible an
impostor, so ingenious a cheat, that he rises from scoundrelism almost
to greatness.

There is, indeed, something of the greatness of Falstaff in this
trafficker of dead "souls." His baseness is almost sublime. He in any
case merits a place in the gallery of humanity's typical and human
rascals, where Falstaff, Tartuffe, Pecksniff, and Count Fosco reign.
He has the great saving merit of being human; nor can he be accused of
hypocrisy. His coachman, Selifan, who got drunk with every "decent
man," is worthy of the creator of Sam Weller. But what distinguishes
Gogol in his _Dead Souls_ from the great satirists of other nations,
and his satire from the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift, for instance, is
that, after laying bare to the bones the rascality of his hero, he
turns round on his audience and tells them that there is no cause for
indignation; Chichikov is only a victim of a ruling passion--gain;
perhaps, indeed, in the chill existence of a Chichikov, there may be
something which will one day cause us to humble ourselves on our knees
and in the dust before the Divine Wisdom. His irony is lined with
indulgence; his sleepless observation is tempered by fundamental
charity. He sees what is mean and common clearer than any one, but he
does not infer from it that life, or mankind, or the world is common
or mean. He infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no lower morally
than he would put Napoleon, Harpagon, or Don Juan--all of them victims
of a ruling passion, and all of them great by reason of it--for
Chichikov is also great in rascality, just as Harpagon was great in
avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. And this large charity
blent with biting irony is again peculiarly Russian.

_Dead Souls_ is a deeper book than any of Gogol's early work. It is
deep in the same way as _Don Quixote_ is deep; and like _Don Quixote_
it makes boys laugh, young men think, and old men weep. Apart from
its philosophy and ideas, _Dead Souls_ had a great influence on
Russian literature as a work of art. Just as Pushkin set Russian
poetry free from the high-flown and the conventional, so did Gogol se