Gogol said that he imagined Dead Souls in the lineage of poetic epics like Dante's Divine Comedy and Homer's Odyssey. He chooses Chichikov as his hero, in parallel to Dante and Odysseus, and structures the novel as a series of episodes of travel. The structure of the book neatly mirrors these two epics in that it consists of episodes in which Chichikov travels from place to place having lengthy, and revealing, interactions with a series of persons. In better understanding the context in which Gogol was writing his epic, the reader gains a clearer sense of what he was trying to accomplish with his epic of the "everyday."
Dante's Divine Comedy follows the poet's journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven, as he is guided by the spirit of the Roman poet Virgil and, later, his love interest, Beatrice. The most famous of these sections is the first one, the Inferno, which details Dante's encounters with various figures from history who have been punished for their sins in a manner that mirrors their crime. Two lovers, Paolo and Francesca, are condemned to be blown about by the storm winds of hell in the same way they were swept up in their lust. Similarly, flatterers are sentenced to being buried in excrement, reflecting the lies that they told in their lifetime. Gogol follows a similar pattern in Dead Souls where each of the landowners embodies a different sort of moral flaw: Pliushkin is miserly, while Manilov is self-satisfied.
Homer's Odyssey is the story of the warrior Odysseus's long journey back to his home in Ithaca. After fighting in the Trojan war (as depicted in the Iliad) he spends many years attempting to make his return. He is waylaid over the course of his quest many times, encountering Gods, monsters, and enemies. He does battle with a cyclops in an early episode and later is forced to kill the many suitors who have overtaken his home in his absence. The story frequently makes use of purposeful digressions, as Homer introduces a character and follows the full arc of their history before returning to the present of the narrative. This is a stylistic technique that Gogol also makes use of, as he will spend pages giving a detailed account of the life of a seemingly minor character.
Gogol's appreciation for both of these works seems to have fundamentally shaped the form and content of Dead Souls. Like Dante, Gogol is interested in exploring the darker parts of the human experience and examining how people justify their selfish or cruel behavior. Similar to Homer, Gogol utilizes digressions as a means of burrowing deeper into another character who ultimately reflects back on the novel's main themes. Dead Souls is as much in the tradition of these poetic epics as it is in the tradition of the great works of Russian literature.
