detail a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him
a great symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe
the living of Russia as well as its dead. Chichikov himself is now
generally regarded as a universal character. We find an American
professor, William Lyon Phelps[1], of Yale, holding the opinion that
"no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of
Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American
promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends
entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade,
but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of
his tongue." This is also the opinion held by Prince Kropotkin[2], who
says: "Chichikov may buy dead souls, or railway shares, or he may
collect funds for some charitable institution, or look for a position
in a bank, but he is an immortal international type; we meet him
everywhere; he is of all lands and of all times; he but takes
different forms to suit the requirements of nationality and time."

[1] Essays on Russian Novelists. Macmillan.

[2] Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature. Duckworth and Co.

Again, the work bears an interesting relation to Gogol himself. A
romantic, writing of realities, he was appalled at the commonplaces of
life, at finding no outlet for his love of colour derived from his
Cossack ancestry. He realised that he had drawn a host of "heroes,"
"one more commonplace than another, that there was not a single
palliating circumstance, that there was not a single place where the
reader might find pause to rest and to console himself, and that when
he had finished the book it was as though he had walked out of an
oppressive cellar into the open air." He felt perhaps inward need to