Library Catalog

Gogol’s Crime and Punishment : An essay in the interpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls /

Heftrich, Urs

Gogol’s Crime and Punishment : An essay in the interpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls / Urs Heftrich. - 1 online resource (294 p.) - Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History .

Frontmatter -- Brief Contents -- Detailed Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword -- Introduction: Of Beauty, Truth, and Evil -- Part One: Chichikov’s Prehistory -- 1. Ethos and Epic -- 2. The Ground Plan of Dead Souls -- 3. The Ground Plan of Dead Souls Revisited -- Part Two: Chichikov’s Crime -- 4. On Truth and Lies in a Moral Sense -- 5. The Five Faces of Lying -- 6. In the Shadow Realm of Lies -- Part Three: Chichikov’s Punishment -- 7. Judgment and Rumor -- 8. The Five Acts of the Drama -- 9. Ethos and Epic: Chichikov’s Crime and Punishment -- List of Sources for Illustrations -- Bibliography -- Index

restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

This monograph is nothing less than a bold attempt at solving the riddle of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls that even inspired a staging of Dead Souls at Schauspiel Stuttgart. Heftrich gives a comprehensive, coherent answer to the question of the novel’s meaning by meticulously laying bare its structure. The first part of the monograph is dedicated to one section of Gogol’s novel that has been neglected by virtually all critics - a clue that leads to a strictly ethical reading of Gogol’s epic. Gogol, as it emerges, constructed Dead Souls strictly according to a moral pattern. It is amazing to discover how flawlessly Dead Souls is built in this regard. The novel thus proves to be a true descendant of medieval romance with its inseparable interrelation between ethics and epics.


Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.


In English.

9781644697634

10.1515/9781644697634 doi


LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature.

Allegory. Banality of evil. Dead Souls. Epic. Ethics. Nikolai Gogol. Russian literature.

891.73/3