From the very beginning, "Dead Souls" was conceived by Gogol not only as a literary, but also the most important public cause, and the cause is all-Russian, nationwide. "I started writing Dead Souls ( ... )," Gogol told Pushkin on October 7, 1835. "I want to show at least one side of all of Russia in this novel." Much later, in a letter to Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky in 1848, Gogol explained the idea of his creation: "For a long time I have been preoccupied with the idea of a great work, which would present everything that is both good and bad in the Russian person, and would show us more clearly the property of our Russian nature." The realization of such a grandiose plan also required appropriate artistic means. In Gogol's aesthetics, folk songs and proverbs are the most important sources of identity from which Russian poets should draw inspiration. It is impossible to understand "Dead Souls" without taking into account the folklore tradition and, first of all, the proverbial element that permeates the entire fabric of the poem. "The more I thought about my composition," Gogol wrote in The Author's Confession,"the more I saw that it was not by chance that I should take the characters that I found, but choose only those on which our true Russian, fundamental characteristics were more clearly and deeply imprinted." And since Russian proverbs and sayings most fully expressed the most important features of the national character, human qualities approved by the people or rejected by them, in "Dead Souls" the "proverbial" method of generalization became one of the most important principles of artistic typification. The more generalized one page 96 figurative pictures and character characteristics in which Gogol expresses the essence of a particular phenomenon, situation or human type take on the form, especially since they approach traditional folk poetic formulas. The character of Manilov - a landowner "without enthusiasm", an empty dreamer-is "explained" through the ... Read more