mouth, cold and rigid, finds no longer a word to say at the very
spectacle which formerly possessed the secret of filling my heart with
ecstasy. O my youth! O my fine simplicity!"

Gogol spent the last fifteen years of his life writing this book, and
he left it unfinished. Pushkin gave him the subject, as he had for
"Revizor." One day, when the two men were alone together, Pushkin told
him, merely as a brief anecdote, of an unscrupulous promoter, who went
about buying up the names of dead serfs, thus enabling their owners to
escape payment of the taxes which were still in force after the last
registration. The names were made over to the new owner, with all
legal formalities, so that he apparently possessed a large fortune,
measured in slaves; these names the promoter transferred to a remote
district, with the intention of obtaining a big cash loan from some
bank, giving his fictitious property as security; but he was quickly
caught, and his audacious scheme came to nothing. The story stuck in
Gogol's mind, and he conceived the idea of a vast novel, in which the
travels of the collector of dead souls should serve as a panorama of
the Russian people. Both Gogol and Pushkin thought of "Don Quixote,"
the spirit of which is evident enough in this book. Not long after
their interview, Gogol wrote to Pushkin: "I have begun to write "Dead
Souls." The subject expands into a very long novel, and I think it
will be amusing, but now I am only at the third chapter. . . . I wish
to show, at least from one point of view, all Russia." Gogol declared
that he did not write a single line of these early chapters without
thinking how Pushkin would judge it, at what he would laugh, at what
he would applaud. When he read aloud from the manuscript, Pushkin,
who had listened with growing seriousness, cried, "God! what a sad
country is Russia!" and later be added, "Gogol invents nothing; it is
the simple truth, the terrible truth."