The second volume of “dead souls”: concepts and speculation. Dmitrieva E.E.

burned by the second and never written by the third volume of Nikolai Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” is one of the most mysterious pages in the history of Russian literature, which gave rise to rich mythology, which continues to work to this day. Based on memoirs and archival data, Ekaterina Dmitrieva reconstructs various aspects of this story: from the emergence of the author’s plan to burning the poem and almost detective detection of the early edition of the five chapters from the second volume six months after the death of Gogol. The author talks about the alleged sources of continuation of “dead souls”, as well as the restoration of lost chapters, which became possible thanks to the memories of contemporaries who listened to Gogol reading the full edition of the second part. Separate sections of the books talk about hoaxes and stylizations, the appearance of which in the XIX -XX and XXI centuries contributed to the disappearance of the Gogol manuscript and the revision of the famous thesis about the "divine comedy" of Dante, which allegedly served as an inspiration for the three -part architectonics of "dead souls". Ekaterina Dmitrieva - Doctor of Philology, Head of the Department of Russian Classical Literature IMLI RAS, member of the Academic Group for the publication of complete works and letters of N.V. Gogol, leading researcher IRLI (Pushkin House) RAS.