Two letters from the archive of A.I. Turgenev, and two episodes concerning Gogol’s Dead Souls

The article introduces into scientific circulation two previously unpublished letters from the archive of A.I. Turgenev. Like all letters to and by Turgenev they are remarkable in themselves, and also contain important information concerning the first and second volumes of N.V. Gogol’s Dead Souls . The first letter was addressed to Turgenev by his cousin and manager of his Simbirsk estates, Ivan Semenovich Arzhevitinov, and contains a rather harsh criticism of the newly published first volume of Dead Souls . The peculiarity of this criticism, which would seem to fit into the huge number of already known reviews of Gogol’s poem, is that it was written by a provincial landowner who was offended not because he recognized himself in the characters depicted in the work (as there were many such cases). On the contrary, Dead Souls is criticized by a landowner for whom the life described by Gogol was not an artistic fiction, but everyday prose filled with the noblest aspirations. Arzhevitinov’s judgment on Dead Souls is incorporated into a discussion of what for him were pressing issues: about the situation of obligated peasants, about fires that afflicted entire volosts, etc. Of course, he does not find any echo of these problems in Dead Souls . The second of the letters published here came from the pen of A. I. Turgenev himself and was addressed to his cousin Alexandra Ilyinichna Nefedieva, one of his favorite correspondents. In it, he reports on the second volume of Dead Souls , allegedly already written by 1843, which to a certain extent may change the idea of the chronology of writing and burning of redactions of the second volume. The publication of the letters is accompanied by an introductory article and commentaries.