Book, Dead Souls[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Dead Souls and The Inspector General, by Gogol, constituted two extraordinary milestones in the history of Russian literature. There, until the beginning of the 19th century, the formative and dominant works of the language had been poems and epics, especially those of Lomonosov and Pushkin. With Gógol, prose acquired the status of art and the reality of the country revealed itself, to the astonishment of many, beyond its apparent lightness of mockery, a bitter, merciless and grotesque portrait of society. For this reason, the central idea of ​​the novel, suggested by Pushkin after reading a journalistic note, allowed Gógol to brilliantly paint an enormous variety of characters, whose strength lies in their power to characterize the universal through the specific, which led Pushkin to say, despite all the comedy distilled there: 'I didn't laugh, I cried, God, how sad our Russia is'. Thus, the name 'dead souls' constitutes not only a metaphor for a coup or a cunning practice in the tsarist regime, but also an expression of how far the decline of the human spirit can go, the contradiction it can enter into with all its ethical standard and religious foundation of existence. This double portrait is what certainly makes the work perennial, the 'Gogolian' laughter that, to this day, reaches the reader, not only in its authorial textuality, but also in the trace it left in the literature of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Babel, in poetry and in theater, which represents, without a doubt, the greatest sign of this Russian-Ukrainian writer's vision and strength of language. N. Cunha and J. Guinsburg