The Second Volume of Dead Souls. Designs and Speculations

The burned second volume and the unwritten third volume of Nikolai Gogol's poem "Dead Souls" is one of the most mysterious pages in the history of Russian literature, giving rise to a rich mythology that continues to reproduce itself to... this day. Based on memoir and archival data, Ekaterina Dmitrieva reconstructs various aspects of this story: from the emergence of the author's concept to the burning of the poem and the almost detective discovery of an early version of five chapters from the second volume six months after Gogol's death. The author discusses the presumed sources of the continuation of "Dead Souls," as well as the restoration of lost chapters, made possible by the memories of contemporaries who listened to Gogol reading the complete edition of the second part. Separate sections of the book address the mystifications and stylizations that emerged in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, spurred by the disappearance of Gogol's manuscript and the reassessment of the famous thesis about Dante's "Divine Comedy," which allegedly served as inspiration for the three-part architecture of "Dead Souls." Ekaterina Dmitrieva is a Doctor of Philological Sciences, head of the Department of Russian Classical Literature at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a member of the academic group for the publication of the Complete Works and Letters of N. V. Gogol, and a leading researcher at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.