The publication of Dead Souls in 1842 brought into print an unfinished work that its introduction calls a great prose classic of Russia and a foundational point in the history of the Russian novel. The book’s importance rests not simply on its literary influence: its combination of satire with pity and tolerance gives it a distinctive tragic humour and a quality the introduction identifies as peculiarly Russian.

Publication and Literary Place

The introduction identifies 1842 as the year Dead Souls was first published and emphasizes that the work was unfinished. It describes the novel as having helped launch the career of the Russian novel, with later Russian masterpieces growing from it like limbs from a single tree. This account makes publication a literary landmark rather than merely a date: the book appears as an early, generative work in a national tradition.

The original title page called the work a “Poem,” a designation that complicates its identity as prose fiction. The introduction compares it with Don Quixote and the Pickwick Papers, placing it in conversation with European works while insisting that its defining quality cannot be reduced to those influences. The comparison frames the book’s formal and literary ancestry without treating it as an imitation.

Influence and Distinctiveness

The introduction associates Cervantes with the work’s structure and Dickens with its background, humour, and characterization. Yet it argues that the quality which most distinguishes Dead Souls is foreign to both models. It names this quality, cautiously, as that of the Russian soul, and describes it through a tendency to pity.

That tendency extends even to characters who are knaves in conventional moral terms. The introduction suggests that such figures may be products of conditions or circumstance, directing criticism toward those conditions rather than toward the individual alone. The resulting perspective does not cancel satire; pity and tolerance operate in tension with it, producing the work’s deep sense of tragic humour.

Reception and Legacy

The introduction presents Dead Souls as distinctively Gogolian and Russian, even as it acknowledges the work’s relation to European masters. It also invokes the famous formulation, “We have all issued out of Gogol’s Cloak.” That remark concerns an earlier short story by Gogol, rather than Dead Souls itself, but it reinforces the introduction’s broader account of Gogol’s formative influence on Russian literature.

The publication’s lasting significance, as described in the introduction, is therefore twofold: Dead Souls stands at the origin of a major prose tradition, and it offers a mode of satire in which moral judgment is complicated by compassion for people formed by their circumstances.