Gogol’s Crime and Punishment

A bold attempt at solving the riddle of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. Gogol constructed the novel strictly according to a moral pattern. The novel thus proves to be a true descendant of medieval romance with its inseparable interrelation between ethics and epics.

Urs Heftrich holds the Chair of Slavic Literatures at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of four monographs. As an editor and prize-winning translator of Czech and Russian poetry, he has been mediating Slavic Literatures in Germany since 1989.

Urs Heftrich holds the Chair of Slavic Literatures at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of four monographs. As an editor and prize-winning translator of Czech and Russian poetry, he has been mediating Slavic Literatures in Germany since 1989.

“This book, which offers a reading of Dead Souls not as a ‘social satire’, but as ‘covert theology’, is a vital addition to the existing body of criticism on Gogol. It is intended for an academic audience as well as the general reader with an interest in Russian literature and Slavic culture.”

— Anna Arkatova, Hong Kong Baptist University, UIC College, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, Vol. 36 (2022)

Reviews of the original German edition:

“Gogol’s Dead Souls is one of those books about which seemingly everything that could possibly be said has already been said. It is all the more amazing then that Urs Heftrich manages to propose a genuinely innovative and illuminating reinterpretation of the novel. . . . Heftrich’s approach combines a close reading of the text’s architecture and motif structure with an overarching hermeneutic that reflects Gogol’s own moral concerns. . . . The author supports his claims with a wealth of observations from the novel, with citations from Gogol’s correspondence, as well as with references to his possible sources, including Schiller, Homer, Dante, and others. . . . The Gogol emerging from this book is a Christian allegorist who couches his message in a tightly constructed web of allusions and correspondences. This may not be the humorist and absurdist that we have come to appreciate, but it is an approach to Gogol’s work that cannot be ignored. Heftrich’s book is a must read for anyone with a serious interest in Dead Souls.”

–Prof. Adrian Wanner, Pennsylvania State University, in The Russian Review, 64, no. 2 (October 2005)

“It is one of the constitutive features of poetic masterpieces that they provide a multitude of levels of meaning. The great texts of world literature, from Shakespeare to Goethe to Mallarmé, continue to occupy critics to this day. In a careful study, the Heidelberg Slavic scholar Urs Heftrich now demonstrates that even a text as often interpreted as Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) is based on a previously unnoticed principle of construction. Heftrich understands Dead Souls as an allegorical representation of a theory of evil.”

–Prof. Ulrich M. Schmid, Universität St. Gallen, in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 16–17, 2005

“[A]n astute structural-analytical and psychotheological study. . . . Heftrich’s analysis represents a completely new advance into the deep structure of one of the most enigmatic works of world literature and will initiate many discussions.”

–Prof. Maria Deppermann, Universität Innsbruck, in Komparatistik. Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (2005/2006)

“The monograph of the Heidelberg Slavist Urs Heftrich on Dead Souls . . . stands in a scholarly tradition that aims at an understanding of the philosophical content of literary texts. . . . [I]t is an extremely differentiated analysis of the motif structure and its philosophical implications, which come together to form the ‘ethical blueprint’ . . . of the novel. . . . [T]he readability of the study is . . . served by the polished, often pictorially descriptive language.”

–Prof. Frank Göbler, Universität Mainz, in Osteuropa 7 (2005)