How Dead Souls drew on Eugene Onegin
A documented line of influence: Nikolai Gogol demonstrably engaged Alexander Pushkin’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin · 1833
RomanticismThe influenced
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol · 1842
RomanticismRelevance
8/10
On Dead Souls’s page
- Gogol got the central idea from Pushkin himself — the dead-serfs plot was Pushkin's gift
- Dead Souls calls itself a "poema" because Eugene Onegin showed the way: digression, social satire, and a narrator who names Russia's vulgarity for what it is
- Reading Pushkin first reveals the mold Gogol poured his cracked, comic Russia into
On Eugene Onegin’s page
- Pushkin literally handed Gogol the plot — the scheme of buying up dead serfs came from him in the mid-1830s
- His novel-in-verse is the formal blueprint for Gogol's "poema": the wandering authorial digressions, the social X-ray, the narrator's eye for poshlust all start here
- The fountainhead of the Russian novel passing the torch to its first great prose comedy