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Article: Serfs up
- Article from:
- The Village Voice
- Article date:
- April 9, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Village Voice Apr 9, 1996. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Dead Souls reminds us that fiction is sometimes entrepreneurial. The novelist has a single idea, and hotly syndicates it in chapter after chapter. Gogol knew this. He garaged the plot of his great book like a secret machine that groaned and creaked its novelty. "What an enormous, original plot]" he wrote to a friend in 1836, six years before its publication. "Don't tell anyone the plot of Dead Soulr. You can tell everyone the title. Only three people...must know what it's really about."
In such fictions--The Plaque and Metamorphosis are other examples--the title works as a trademark, jealously stamping the produce. Gogol's idea for Dead Souls flows from its title: a stranger arrives in an ...