Inessa Kirillova

Nurdin is a man who failed to protect friendship and love, who retreated before deceit and hypocrisy. The benevolent viewer is personified by the Old Man, a character who seems to stand outside the plot. Nurdin tells the Old Man about his life.

In "Dead Souls" Gogol posed the most pressing and painful questions of modern life. The very title of the poem had enormous revealing power; it carried, according to Herzen, “something terrifying”, “he could not name it otherwise; not the revisionists - dead souls, but all these Nozdryovs. Manilovs and all those like them are dead souls, and we meet them at every step..."