From Wikipedia:
"
Vladimir Nabokov, in his 1944 study of Gogol,
Nikolai Gogol, rejected the commonly held view of
Dead Souls as a reformist or satirical work. Nabokov regarded the plot of
Dead Souls as unimportant and Gogol as a great writer whose works skirted the irrational and whose prose style combined superb descriptive power with a disregard for novelistic clichés. In the character of Chichikov, the protagonist of the novel, Nabokov found all the attributes of
poshlost', (a Russian word not precisely translatable into English) meaning the "vulgarity" of the bourgeousie - with overtones of middle-class pretentiousness, fake significance and philistinism. True, Chichikov displays a most extraordinary moral rot, but the whole idea of buying and selling dead souls is, to Nabokov, ridiculous on its face; therefore, the provincial setting of the novel is a most unsuitable backdrop for any of the progressive, reformist or Christian readings of the work."
I'll be reading this Nabokov book too, if it's in English.
Off to the library!