Entre poème et roman, de la réversibilité des genres Les Âmes mortes de Nicolas Gogol

The main concern of this contribution is to explore the reasons why Nicolas Gogol described his major work, Dead Souls, as a poem and not a novel. We will also ask how this text, originally conceived as a novel, was able to absorb a variety of genres and generic models over the course of its development—Dante’s Divine Comedy for example—and how its description as a poem later determined the hermeneutic fate of the work.