Russian Soul - The Term

The Term

The concept of a Russian soul arose in the 1840s chiefly as a literary phenomenon. Famous author Nikolai Gogol and literary critic Vissarion Belinskii jointly coined the term upon the publication of Gogol’s masterpiece Dead Souls in 1842. At the time landowners often referred to their serfs as “souls” for accounting purposes, and the novel’s title refers to the protagonist’s scheme of purchasing claims to deceased serfs. Apart from this literal meaning, however, Gogol also intended the title as an observation of landowners’ loss of soul in exploiting serfs.

Vissarion Belinskii, a notedly radical critic, took Gogol’s intentions a few steps farther and inferred from the novel a new recognition of a national soul, existing apart from the government and founded in the lives of the lower class. Indeed Belinskii used the term “Russian soul” several times in his analyses of Gogol’s work, and from there the phrase grew in prominence, and eventually became more clearly defined through the writings of authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This famous brand of nationalism, however, was the product of a continuous effort by Russia’s various classes to define a national identity.