Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

"This book was just not my cup of tea. Too much solid text to concentrate on"


"personally as a new reading addict these are the kind of books that make me not want to read."


"Gogol had a childish and pathetic hissy-fit when the public called him out on his inadequate novel, and he acted like an immature little bitch. The narrative begins preaching back, mocking, teasing, defending itself, back-pedaling, and even begging. Gogol acts like a bad stand-up comic unprofessionally responding to a heckler. He falters, trembles, and embarrasses himself trying to retaliate. He thus shows his vulnerabilities, and spectacularly fails. Seeing a heckler beat out a stand-up comic makes for some uncomfortable watching, and it gives the impression that one is watching…wait for it…a bad comic. Same goes here. Instead of throwing a tantrum and making up elaborate excuses about ‘actually writing an epic prose-poem’ and burning them because of insecurities over a not-so-good book, get over yourself, do your five minutes, and get the fuck off the stage. Better yet? Don’t even show up."


"Boring, incoherent. If I did not had the habit of finishing what I read , I would have kept it aside after reading the first 50 pages. Gogol did not finish it, probably he realized himself that how monotonous the book had become."


"My main issue was the confusion of intent. Am I supposed to read it humorously? satirically? seriously? ironically? There is no clear indication provided by the author."


"Gogol is very attentive to detail, which is something I appreciate if it's not over done. His descriptions, however, were way too detailed and way too long for me most of the time. I think this was my biggest problem with the book. And my 'thing' in general is that I like to assign colors to books. Like, a vampire book would be red, nothing special there. A science fiction book would be sparkly purple, a novel that contains a lot of sorrow is brownish-orange... Most of the Russian literature I've read are gray. So was Dead Souls. And I'm not too big a fan of that."


"Thanks to Gogol and his missing manuscript pages which, combined with the consistent Russian name conundrum, left many holes in the story and possibly the shallowest ending in the history of classics. What author could get away with that today?.... 'Oh.. sorry publisher... my dog ate some of the chapters, so we'll just let the readers attempt to connect the dots of the story. I mean, I'm sure people are so desperate for entertainment, they will overlook a little detail like continuity.' (In other words, hopefully my readers' creativity will actually improve this train wreck of a story)."


"I can't believe I agreed to read this. Gogol is so EMO!"