Abstract
There is a hypothesis that Gogol was planning to move the setting of the second volume of Dead Souls to Siberia. The paper offers one more explanation of this design. Gogol seems to have left a clue in the last of the surviving chapters of the second volume where he outlines the theme of the Schismatics (Old Believers). This theme is not casual: it was in the 1840s, when the state-afflicted repressions of the Old Believers began, and the activities of the latter became the object of investigation by various commissions. A member of one of these commissions was Ivan Aksakov who became particularly interested in one of the schismatics sects, namely the sect of wanderers or runners. The ideology of this extremely left branch of the Old Believers linked to the legend of Land of White Waters enables us to reconsider the purchase of the dead souls plot. The runners believed that not only the Niconian church incarnated Antichrist; they considered the audit of rustic population as demonic practice. Here we come to the point where the idea of Gogol’s poem and the doctrine of the runners overlap. Let us recall that already in the first volume of the poem, Chichikov, the buyer of the dead souls, is called Antichrist. At the same time, the theme of the runners who fled to Siberia in search of their Belovodie, a kind of peasant paradise on earth, “supports” Gogol’s plan for spiritual enlightenment and transformation of his characters in the second volume of Dead Souls.
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