Mrtve duše

Gogol's finely honed critical spirit seems to see just about all the weaknesses of his contemporaries, precisely dissecting them and serving them with mild mockery and irony, but also with benevolence towards everything human, with benevolent understanding for everyone, without accusing anyone. With astonishing ease, he exposed the circumstances of the time and mocked the provincial mentality, landowners and nobles, officials and skorojevićs, creating characters who became models for laziness, obstinacy, self-love, bribery, hypocrisy in Russian society... At one point even - when living, but spiritually the dead, whose only goal is to gain a living by any means and at any cost, haggle over the dead (souls) talking about them as if they were alive - blurring the line between the living and the dead. So Gogol in the book, but also with the book itself, shook the laws of space and time, because if we take a look at his house or ours or, for that matter, whose house, it seems that the circumstances and people are more or less the same as they were a century or two ago , and we can calmly put our hand in the fire if it wasn't much different before...