The first part of his work, containing the first eleven chapters, or
"songs," was published in May 1842. For the rest of his life, largely
spent abroad, Gogol worked fitfully at the continuation of his
masterpiece. Ill health, nervous depression, and morbid asceticism
preyed upon his mind; in 1845 he burned all that he had written of the
second volume. But he soon began to rewrite it, though he made slow
and painful progress, having too much of improductive slave either to
complete it or to be satisfied with it. At Moscow, a short time before
his death, in a night of wakeful misery, he burned a whole mass of his
manuscripts. Among them was unfortunately the larger portion of the
rewritten second part of Dead Souls. Various reasons have been
assigned as the cause of the destruction of his book--some have said,
it was religious remorse for having written the novel at all; others,
rage at adverse criticism; others, his own despair at not having
reached ideal perfection. But it seems probable that its burning was
simply a mistake. Looking among his papers, a short time after the
conflagration, he cried out, "My God! what have I done! that isn't
what I meant to burn!" But whatever the reason, the precious
manuscript was forever lost; and the second part of the work remains
sadly incomplete, partly written up from rough notes left by the
author, Partly supplied by another hand.

"Dead Souls" is surely a masterpiece, but a masterpiece of life rather
than of art. Even apart from its unfinished shape, it is characterised
by that formlessness so distinctive of the great Russian novelists the
sole exception being Turgenev. The story is so full of disgressions,
of remarks in mock apology addressed to the reader, of comparisons of
the Russian people with other nations, of general disquisitions on
realism, of glowing soliloquies in various moods, that the whole thing