Gogol's Dead Souls
A scam with dead serfs becomes a portrait of Russia
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In 1842 the first volume of Nikolai Gogol's 'poem' came out in Moscow: Chichikov buys up landowners' dead serfs who are still counted alive in the census. Gogol burned the second volume in 1852, shortly before his death.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Europe
- 1839 Birth of photography: the daguerreotype — 3 years earlier
- 1845–1852 Great Famine in Ireland — 3 years later
- 1848–1849 Revolutions of 1848 — 6 years later
- 1848 The Communist Manifesto — 6 years later
- 1861 Unification of Italy — 19 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 14 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 3 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 3 years earlier
Africa
- 1830 France invades Algiers — 12 years earlier
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 7 years earlier
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 5 years later
Asia
- c. 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa — 11 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Opium War — 3 years earlier
- 1850–1864 Taiping Rebellion — 8 years later
- 1853–1854 Commodore Perry's Black Ships — 11 years later
- 1856–1860 Second Opium War — 14 years later
Americas
- 1824 Battle of Ayacucho — 18 years earlier
- 1835 Darwin in the Galápagos — 7 years earlier
- 1838–1839 Trail of Tears — 4 years earlier
- 1846 First public demonstration of ether anaesthesia — 4 years later
- 1846–1848 Mexican–American War — 4 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 9 years later
Alive at the time
- Charles Darwin (aged 33)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 33)
- Karl Marx (aged 24)
- Queen Victoria (aged 23)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 21)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 14)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 8)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (aged 2)
- Katsushika Hokusai (aged 82)
- Andrew Jackson (aged 75)