How Dead Souls drew on The Divine Comedy
A documented line of influence: Nikolai Gogol demonstrably engaged Dante Alighieri’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1320
MedievalThe influenced
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol · 1842
RomanticismRelevance
8/10
On Dead Souls’s page
- Dead Souls was conceived as a Russian Divine Comedy — Chichikov's tour through a gallery of damned landowners is its Inferno
- Gogol wrote it in Rome, modeling a three-part ascent on Dante's Inferno–Purgatorio–Paradiso; only the first, the descent into vice, was ever finished
- Read the Commedia first and Gogol's grand plan declares itself — the catalog of the damned was meant to climb toward redemption that never came
On The Divine Comedy’s page
- Gogol planned Dead Souls as a Russian Divine Comedy — three parts mapped onto Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso
- The novel we have is the Inferno: a gallery of damned provincial landowners, a catalog of vice with no redeemed soul in sight
- He wrote it in Rome with Dante's trilogy before him, looking to the Commedia for the moral arc he meant to complete