Word: chichikov
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Based on the novel by Gogol, the opera has all the marks of a major work except memorable music. Gogol's irresistible tale of the scheming Chichikov (the splendid high baritone Igor Morozov), who would "buy" dead serfs in order to build a bogus prosperity on their collateral, holds the stage splendidly. The handsome duplex set by Designer Valery Levental is a sky- above, mudslinging-below construct. But beyond the "aria portraits" that graphically limn each of the principal characters, Dead Souls contains every cliche in the state manual, including the obligatory lament for the suffering people that has been...
Gogol was one of those writers who take up their country's venality as their cross. The closest U.S. equivalent of Dead Souls is Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. Gogol's confidence man is Chichikov (Vladimir Belokurov), an on-the-make bureaucrat who haggles with miserly and drunken aristocrats for their dead serfs (listed on the government tax rolls as alive) so that he may pose as a propertied man, float a mortgage loan, and make a fashionable marriage. Just as murder is war in miniature, Gogol's Chichikov is a comic common cold symbolizing...
...scandal had really begun back in 1945. In that year Smith's enrollment figures suddenly began to soar, entitling Sandusky to thousands of extra dollars in state aid. Though no one suspected it at the time, Sandusky's school lists were just about as phony as Chichikov's serfs in Dead Souls. By 1950, said the investigators, Superintendent Smith was claiming state aid for 1,243 pupils, when his actual total enrollment was only 797. Last year he claimed 1,253 pupils, actually had only 785. Some of the names were fictitious; some belonged to students long...
...story concerns one Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant, who travels around Russia buying up the names of "dead souls"-serfs who have died since the last census. Once he has accumulated a large enough roster of these imaginary people, Chichikov intends to raise a huge mortgage on them, invest the money somehow or other and make himself a rich man. It is at once an uproariously funny story and a sulphuric satire on Russian society. Gogol was able to sound the deepest and most secret of men's motives as surehandedly as a peasant pawing up his potato crop...
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