Vitezović's aphorisms suggest a double reception to the modern reader in a certain, sensitive way.
They should be read in the time when they were written and now, so to speak, timeless, when the so-called reality surpassed and rhymed with many "harsh words" with its original satire.
This book, which can be called a rich chronicle of retired life, also corresponds with today's times, but it will still confirm a different world, events and experiences that we would forget without Smoja.
Dead Souls (1842) is a brilliant satire that exposes the moral and social rot of imperial Russia through Chichikov's fraud with dead serfs, with Gogol's virtuoso mix of humor, irony and lyricism.