NIKOLAI GOGOL, "FATHER of the RUSSIAN NOVEL" (But He's Actually Ukrainian?) | Dead Letter Society #2

This is part of my "empathy and appreciation for the new bogeyman"--that means I'm covering Russian authors and thinkers for the foreseeable future--because this is how societies label authors as "Degenerate Art," a regrettable epithet that's been applied to Jews, Gypsies, Pollocks, homosexuals... whoever was "undesirable" to an advanced civilization (i.e. supposedly "civilized" people).

Second on the list is Nikolai Gogol and his "unfinished masterpiece"---the novel just ends in midsentence, which is almost postmodernist in practice, but the story has already hit its climax--it follows a dissipated rake named Chichikov roving the old Russian countryside in search of dead souls.

Now, this comes from an archaic practice of counting serfs (indentured slaves bound to a master referred to famously as "kulaks" during the Russian Revolution) with the ecclesiastic unit of measure being "souls..." And due to a bureaucratic lag at the time, the Czarist government only performed a census of these "souls" along with everyone else every great while---much like it's done in America today every 10 years---so theoretically this rascal, Chichikov, could slide in and buy up these dead depreciated souls because the government would tax the "dead souls" either way. It plays on endemic corruption, both in the the slaveowners and the system writ-large because these rich folks are willing to sell the souls while the government labels them as such (i.e. taxing them, evidently, even after the "souls" return to their true master) .

I believe that Gogol touches on the current talking points, because the author is considered the "father of the Russian novel"---a medium that was crafted for satire, to build a derivative parallel for something to lessen the blow and secure publication---and it also touches on another culture that's as white as my asscheek, and yet they had slavery. The feudalist system itself could be seen as slavery.

That's not to lessen the impact of slavery in this country, but the way American academics talk about the universal phenomenon... it really mimics a black nationalist narrative told by group like the Nation of Islam or the African Hebrew Israelites, blaming something that's a universal quality of humanity (even in the modern era) complete on European diaspora. This example is square in people's faces, so I think it should be considered.

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