Dead Souls Symbology as Discursive Construction of Memory in Gogol and Barnes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Resting upon carefully depicted juxtaposition of unrelated phenomena, such as death and a living soul, Gogol’s Dead Souls incorporates a disturbing narrative ambivalence into stylistic representation of humanity. Such a disquieting plot line has been thoroughly revisited in Barnes’s The Noise of Time, in which the symbology of a dead soul is directly connected with one who lives and remembers. The article explores several intertextual connections between Gogol’s dead souls and Barnes’s death of the soul, in order to demonstrate how death symbology may contribute to the discursive construction of memory in Russian and English literatures and cultures.