what is this, CODE??????!!

well, a translation would be appreciated anyway...
 

Tom, I was too lazy to do any translation from Polish.
First of all I tend to think that only few people read this so called scrapbook-blog-thingy and I post here mostly for my own amusement, mainly notes I might look at later.
So the context for the above post is thusly presented here: I have just read Gogol's "Dead Souls" in Polish. (I did attempt it once in English but gave up since the translation wasn't that good.) - After that I have read some reviews of 'Dead Souls' and I was kind of struck thinking that they all miss the point -- I think the book has nothing to do with 'Dead Souls' of peasants that Chichikov is purchasing. I think Gogol describes all those Living people and parades them in front of us showing them with 'Dead Souls'. It is Chichikov who is Dead Soul and so almost everybody else in that book. I don't think there is any character there who is radiating Life. They are all Dead Souls. - Also most reviews of the book say that at the end Chichikov's plot is discovered but that is not so. Yes, the rumor spread by the old woman who arrives in town and the ever present liar and drunk are repeated by all but so what, each one of them adds their own interpretation who Chchikov is and what "Dead Souls" might mean. It is there plainly in the book. They all try to figure out what "Dead Souls" means and I think the governor figures and dies and nobody knows why he dies. Nobody in town knows what to do with it and bizarre interpretations spring up. I think almost no one can think straight in this town, they are all Dead Souls stuffed with noise with their mouths moving and noise leaking out of them. (And speaking of noise the english versions of Dead Souls I've read are quite dead themselves. Here is an interesting review that mentions it: "Gogol’s most Gogolian punishment, something his paltry demons might have conjured up, has been his translators, who have almost always been pedantic and humorless. And what is the point of reading humorless comedy? Gogol’s idiosyncratic play with language, his sense of the funniest possible word, the rhythms of his absurd syntax—the reasons Nabokov considered him Russia’s greatest writer—are replaced by prose "as flat as a pancake.")

So in all of these reviews I chanced upon this Playbill in Polish, from "Revizor" play at Bagatela Theater in Warsaw. (English title: "The Inspector General"). While reading "Dead Souls" what struck me was how Chichikov behaves towards people with power, how he courts it and how others behave in the presence of it. - and then there is this blurb about "The Inspector General" - I will try my best english version here:

Gogol provides moments of elation to his provincial bozos who are awaiting the arrival - unimportant if a false or a true Inspector General. He thinks warmly of them, understands their bitterness. He lets them dream about "good, human government" (...) Gogol understood that to a dumdum citizen of a faraway province it does not matter to partake in Governing Power, to watch its hands. Gogol's character wants this Power to look at him all the time. Because this Power was created for that purpose - let it see everything, let it understand everything, intimidate us from time to time and forgive in the end. In a Myth where Power is so comprehended people search for justifications of their own smallness.

So I like that quote and stuck it here. So in the end yes, this is all CODE, like DEAD SOULS is CODE and no one can seem to crack it. But like in the Revizor play I think Gogol could've just put a little note in the mouth of one of the characters saying something like this "Chichikov is here to buy Dead Souls. We are Dead Souls and he is buying us". Anyway. Gogol is brilliant, quite mad as was expected. Only a madman could have written such a brilliant book and Revizor play.