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Literary history has to some extent spoiled our apprehension of the work we know as Mertvye dushi. Thanks to the author's letters, his friends' memoirs, and the carefully assembled fragments of his projected sequel, we cannot escape the awareness that Nikolai Gogol' left the novel incomplete, unachieved.1 In fact, however, when viewed in the context of other works by Gogol', this "unfinished" novel is marked by a special type of closure and formal unity. The text is modeled on the riddle, particularly the type of riddle known as parable, and the illusion of open-endedness is designed to mock the thirst for an answer awakened by the enigma.

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