Второй и третий тома «Мертвых душ»: замыслы и домыслы

Abstract

The article deals with the most «obscure» issues of the history of the second volume of the Dead Souls, burned thrice, but risen from the ashes, albeit in an earlier, discarded version, as well as with Gogol’s plan to keep on writing the poem in volume three. Based on the documentary data, the history of the rediscovered fi ve chapters of the second volume is reconstructed in detail. The memoirs of Gogol’s contemporaries, who had attended the reading of the completed chapters of the second volume, provide the grounds for the reconstruction of the storylines of the second volume and of the characters that didn’t make their appearance in the fi ve discovered chapters. A separate section is devoted to the problem of the third volume of the Dead Souls, in which the characters were to un-dergo a spiritual transformation, with the locus moving to Siberia where Chichikov, presumably, formed spiritual ties with the Old Believers — the hypothesis that is put forward in V. Sharov’s novel Return to Egypt.