SOURCE: “The Evils of Dead Souls,” in By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia, Northwestern University Press, 1998, pp. 57-92.

In the following excerpt, Weiner describes the demonological elements of Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls and their relationship to the novelist's authorial persona.

Sobakevich, Pliushkin, and Demonic Isolation

The Devil acquired national characteristics in this first great Russian demonic novel [Dead Souls] through Gogol's creative use of two religious demonologies that antedate the christianization of Rus, but endured in legend and literature until Gogol's day and beyond. These are the Slavonic myth involving the pagan devil Koshchei the Deathless (Koshchei Bessmertnyi) and Bogomilism's heretical dualist cosmogony. By invoking the Koshchei myth Gogol's narrator invites us to piece together the elements of a pagan-folk demonology that are scattered throughout the novel and that mainly implicate Sobakevich, Pliushkin, and the narrator. The narrator's comment that “there are yet many remnants...