Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, is up there with Brian Wilson’s Smile as one of the greatest works of art never properly completed. But Dead Souls, at least to me, is so much more troubling because of the circumstances of its failure to launch.

Dead Souls was intended to be a literary trilogy paralleling Dante’s Divine Comedy. The three parts of the divine comedy are Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The first part of Dead Souls, the only part ever completed, pictures the protagonist Chichikov (whose name is meant to remind the reader of a suppressed sneeze) as a sniveling, scheming, petty worm of a man scraping for honors and wealth he never intends to earn or justify. It’s the Inferno portion of Gogol’s piece, and Gogol realized the ugly Chichikov (and the opulently indifferent feudal Russia) masterfully. The second part, what fragments are left of it, was to be Chichikov’s redemption through suffering (the Purgatorio portion of the narrative). Gogol was never satisfied with it. He burned almost every manuscript for it he wrote. Critics have wondered what happened to the project—and Gogol. His fictional output basically ground to a halt before his death. Most critics think the key to the whole thing is Gogol’s conversion to Christianity in 1840. As Robert Maguire explains: