1. For the authoritative edition of the surviving text of the sequel, with variants and relevant excerpts from his notebooks, see volume 7 of Gogol', N. V., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (Moscow : Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1937-1952)Google Scholar. Works by Gogol’ are cited according to this edition. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

2. For discussions of the use of poema by Gogol’ see Fanger, Donald, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 165–168 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gippius, Vasilii, Gogol’ (Leningrad : Mysl', 1924; Brown University Slavic Reprint, 1963), 135–153 Google Scholar; Kazintsev, A. I. and Kazintseva, N. A., “Avtor dvukh poem,” in Gogol' : lstoriia i sovremennost', ed. Kozhinov, V. V. et al. (Moscow : Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1985, 318–324 Google Scholar; Mann, Iurii, “O zhanre Mertvykh dush,” hvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR, Seriia literatury i iazyka, 31, no. 1 (1972) : 12–16 Google Scholar; and Todd, William Mills III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1986), 177–179 Google Scholar.

3. Young, Edward, The Complaint : or, Night Thoughts (Hartford : Andrus and Son, 1845), 19, 15 Google Scholar. The web of sources is even more complex : The same “Night” includes several lines that were later incorporated into the ode “Bog” (1784) by Gavrila Derzhavin. An episode in Derzhavin's poem “Vel'mozha,” (1794), in which a maimed veteran waits on the convenience of a slothful nobleman, is a prototype for the plot of “Kopeikin” (see Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 285).

4. The similarity of the Kopeikin and Chichikov narratives in genre and structure is briefly noted by Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 178.

5. Simon Franklin has compared the open-endedness of Mertvye dushi with that of Aleksandr Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, with illuminating results : “Novels without End : Notes on ‘Eugene Onegin’ and ‘Dead Souls, '” Modern Language Review 79 (April 1984) : 372-383. For a brilliant and erudite study of the fragment in Pushkin, see Monika Dudli Frenkel, “ ‘V malen'koj ramke' : Fragmentary Structures in Pushkin's Poetry and Prose” (Ph.d. diss. Yale, 1984). See also Robert Belknap's argument, on structural grounds, for the fictionality of the narrator's promise of a continuation to Feodor Dostoevskii's Brat'ia Karamazov in The Structure of “The Brothers Karamazov” (The Hague : Mouton, 1967), 106-110.

6. Gogol’ summed up his disdain for the strict separation of genres and stylistic levels in an 1834 letter to M. A. Maksimovich regarding a proposed folk-song collection : “In my opinion, there is no need for separation of the songs. The more diversity the better. I love to encounter next to one song another one, of a completely opposite content…. Separation is the least important thing” (10 : 306). Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz'iami (1846) has drawn critical attention more for its thematic hodgepodge of mysticism, literary criticism, and reactionary sociopolitical philosophy than for its form, but I would like to note here that it belongs among the internally fragmentary works of Gogol'. The “selections,” ostensibly and often actually excerpted from private letters, sometimes begin with ellipses. The reader is left to conjecture that personal news and private concerns have been excised, leaving only the philosophical and critical core of the letters. As a paradigm of this self-censorship, point 6 of the opening “Testament” is omitted; a footnote explains, “This point contains instructions on family matters” (8 : 222).

7. Minor, J., ed., Friedrich Schlegel 1794-1802 : Seine prosaischen Jugendschriften, 2 vols. (Vienna : CarlKonegen, 1882) 2 : 364 Google Scholar.

8. One of the many flaws in the conception of the sequel to Mertvye dushi is the decision to have Chichikov continue the same dead-souls scheme in a different town, rather than inventing a new scheme that would, like each of Chichikov's previous schemes, have its own specific metaphorical weight.

9. From the point of view of closure, Igroki belongs with the two major plays, Revizor (1836) and Zhenit'ba (1842). In each play, one of the major characters suddenly flees, leaving his victim (s) in stunned surprise or powerless anger. In Revizor, the false inspector, Khlestakov, has escaped in his troika, leaving the townspeople to face the real inspector. In Zhenit'ba, the reluctant suitor Podkolesin has jumped out the window, leaving his bride and her matchmakers empty-handed. Igroki ends with an impassioned speech by the cardsharp Ikharev, who has found himself duped and abandoned by more skillful con men. Although these works cannot be considered conclusively closed, since their final scenes of anger and vowed revenge convey anything but a sense of equilibrium, they are still not as future-oriented as other promissory works, such as “Shpon'ka,” “Rim,” the dramatic fragments, and Mertvye dushi. Mertvye dushi, of course, also ends with an escape, but, instead of being left gaping with the townspeople, the reader accompanies Chichikov on his flight into apotheosis. “Shinel “’ (1842), with its conclusive closure, stands apart from the other works of 1842 as strikingly as the open-ended “Shponka” does from the other stories in Vechera.

10. One of Roland Barthes's self-referential fragments may be applied to Gogol' : “Liking to find, to write beginnings, he tends to multiply this pleasure : that is why he writes fragments : so many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures (but he doesn't like the ends : the risk of the rhetorical clausule is too great : the fear of not being able to resist the lastword)” in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York : Hill and Wang, 1977), 94.

11. Iurii Mann has, with characteristic incisiveness, suggested that the dramatic fragments are Gogol’ 's “little comedies,” the counterpart to Pushkin's “little tragedies,” in N. V. Gogol', Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, ed. S. I. Mashinskii and M. B. Khrapchenko, notes by Iu. V. Mann (Moscow : Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1977) 4 : 428. The parallel with Pushkin's beautifully shaped fragments would, I believe, reward further examination.

12. See Pedrotti, Louis, “The Architecture of Love in Gogol “s ‘Rome, '” California Slavic Studies 6 (1971) : 17–27 Google Scholar : “Although it bears the subtitle ‘fragment, ’ the story is structurally whole and may be considered closer to completion than many of Gogol’ 's other works” (20-21). Compare one of Friedrich von Schlegel's most famous aphorisms : “ Viele Werke der Alten sind Fragment geworden. Viele Werke der Neuern sind es gleich bey der Entstehung” [Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments from the very beginning],” Minor, Friedrich Schlegel, vol. 2, 207.

13. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, Poetic Closure : A Study of How Poems End (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1968), 35 Google Scholar.

14. Seminar on Mertvye dushi by Robert Maguire, Yale University, 1984.

15. Eliot, George, Middlemarch, 4 vols. (Edinburgh : William Blackwood and Sons, 1873) 1 : 348 Google Scholar.

16. The shift in tone in “Rim” was apparently a fortunate one for Gogol’ 's audience at the home of Prince D. V. Golitsyn, as Sergei Aksakov relates. The fashionable crowd, almost lulled to sleep by the solemn periods describing the hero's education, were awakened by the lively comic scenes near the end of the story. See Aksakov, S. T., Istoriia moego znakomstva s Gogolem (Moscow, 1960), 56–58 Google Scholar.

17. Gogol’ 's penchant for the panoramic landscape view is another sign of his indebtedness to German romantic philosophy and literature. See Marshall Brown : “The view from a height over a surrounding landscape is one of the most characteristic situations found in German romantic literature. The landscapes are never realistic; they are marked by an abundance and variety of objects and inhabitants, shapes and contours symbolic of the plenitude of life itself. To see the unity in this multiplicity, the form in this chaos, and to discover the universal human experience are the observer's task, set by the central commanding prospect” in Brown, Marshall, The Shape of German Romanticism (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1979), 43 Google Scholar.

18. Minor, ed., Schlegel 2 : 206-207.

19. A century later, Bertolt Brecht, a poet very far removed from Gogol’ in style and philosophy, gave expression to precisely this feeling in his poem “Of All the Works of Man “ : Of all the works of man I like best Those which have been used. The copper pots with their dents and flattened edges The knives and forks whose wooden handles Have been worn away by many hands : such forms Seemed to me the noblest … Even broken pieces of sculpture With their hands lopped off, are dear to me. They too Were alive for me. They were dropped, yet they were also carried, They were knocked down, yet they never stood too high. Half ruined buildings once again take on The look of buildings waiting to be finished Generously planned : their fine proportions Can already be guessed at, but they still Need our understanding. Poems 1913-1956, ed. and trans. John Willett and Ralph Manheim with the cooperation of Erich Fried (New York : Methuen, 1976), 192-193). David Rosand has discussed the dual nature of the fragment in painting and sculpture : “If the fragment as decomposed, disintegrated form assumed a satisfying legitimacy in the esthetic eye, then the fragment as unachieved or becoming form could lay claim to similar status… . Implicated here … is a corollary deepening involvement of the beholder, who is invited to complete the forms in his mind.” ( “Composition/ Decomposition/Recomposition : Notes on the Fragmentary and the Artistic Process,” in Fragments : Incompletion and Discontinuity, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman [New York : New York Literary Forum, 1981], 20, 21).

20. See Chizhevsky, Dmitri, “On Gogol's ‘The Overcoat, '” in Dostoevsky and Gogol : Texts and Criticism, ed. Meyer, Priscilla and Rudy, Stephen (Ann Arbor, Mich. : Ardis, 1979), 137–160 Google Scholar; and Nabokov, Vladimir, Nikolai Gogol (New York : New Directions, 1944, 89–91 Google Scholar.

21. Kermode, Frank, The Genesis of Secrecy : On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1979), 24 Google Scholar.

22. Funk, Robert W., Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God : The Problem of Language in the New Testament and Contemporary Theology (New York : Harper and Row, 1966), 153 Google Scholar; “The hearer … affirms, ‘This is the world in which I live, ’ but his world is then ruptured by an alien ‘logic’ which leaves him no choice but to confirm or deny” (194).

23. Fuchs, Ernst, “The New Testament and the Hermeneutical Problem,” in New Frontiers in Theology, II : The New Hermeneutic, ed. Robinson, James M. and Cobb, J. B., Jr. (New York : Harper and Row, 1964), 143 Google Scholar.

24. Linnemann, Eta, Parables of Jesus : Introduction and Exposition, trans. Sturdy, John (London : S.P.C.K., 1975), 20 Google Scholar.

25. Arnol'di, L. I., “Moe znakomstvo s Gogolem,” Russkii vestnik 37, no. 1 (1862) : 70 Google Scholar. This passage was omitted from the article when it was reprinted in 1952, because it failed to harmonize with the Soviet image of Gogol’ as a realist. See Brodskii, N. L. et al., eds., Gogol’ v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow : Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1952), 472–498 Google Scholar.

26. Linnemann, Parables of Jesus, 30-31.

27. In his brilliant study of the Gospel of Mark and the interpretation of narrative, Frank Kermode reminds us that it is in acts of divination that the interpreter's true art resides : “We tend to reserve our highest praise for those interpretations that seem most intuitive, most theory-free, seeming to proceed from some untrammeled divinatory impulse, having the gratuity, the fortuity of genius. The possibility of such divinations may explain why Hermes once laid claim to a share in the lyre of Apollo” (Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, 4).

28. Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 202.

29. Gogol’ burned portions of part 2 in 1845 as well as immediately before his death in 1852. He refers here to the first burning (7 : 400). Emphasis in the quotation is mine.

30. Miguel de Saavedra, Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. Cohen, J. M. (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1950), 465, 928–929 Google Scholar. I wish to thank Gary Saul Morson for bringing to my attention the parallel between Cervantes's sequel and Gogol’ 's sequel.

31. See N. M. Pavlov : “The great artist died a martyr both to his understanding and misunderstanding of his task—a great artist not when he was writing and rewriting the second Mertvye dushi, but every time he burned it.” “Gogol’ i slavianofily,” Russkii arkhiv (1890), no. 1, 145.