I won't deny Dead Souls has literary merit and thematic depth. It's hard for me to judge the prose since I've learned to mistrust translations. But I have a hard time getting into Russian literature — I have yet to discover the Russian novel or author who really "speaks" to me — and Gogol didn't really seem to know where he was going with Dead Souls, only what he wanted to do when he got there. As Peter Boxall says in the aforementioned 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die:
"The writing of Dead Souls drove Gogol mad. It started off as a humorous idea for a story, the conceit being that Chichikov, a scheming opportunist, would travel through Russia buying up the rights to dead serfs (souls), who had not yet been purged from the census and could therefore - like all chattels - still be mortgaged. As the novel grew, so did Gogol's aspirations; his goal became no less than to rekindle the noble yet dormant core of the Russian people, to transform the troubled social and economic landscape of Russia into the gleaming great Empire that was its destiny. He no longer wanted to write about Russia; he wanted to save it. He was driven into messianic obsession and, having burnt Part Two - twice - after ten years of labor, he committed suicide by starvation."
That's one of the problems with Dead Souls: on a purely novelistic level, it's incomplete. Gogol planned for it to be a sweeping three-part epic, and the fragment that is left is quite literally unfinished, with missing parts even before the end. So we never do see what comes of Chichikov's scheme. The novel ends in the middle of a long sententious speech about corruption by a Russian prince.
That Gogol was long and rambly had a point he wanted to make is obvious in this book. We can see an author who loved his country, who, as Jane Smiley says in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel:
"Like many Russian writers, Gogol employed his gifts in trying to discern the nature of Russianness and in forging a literary identity for Russia that would somehow help to engender a road to the future."
Thus, Dead Souls is a book about "Russianness" as much as it is a story about Chichikov, an amoral huckster who conceives a scheme to become rich by buying dead souls from credulous, venal landowners.
Chichikov is a character, and Gogol's treatment of Russian peasantry and the upper classes alike is sharply satirical. Gogol seems to have a sense of humor, unlike Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. At the same time, he's still writing a Tolstoy-like ponderous Russian Epic (even if Dead Souls' unfinished state leaves it somewhat less ponderous in size), and so between Chichikov's misadventures and a host of other Dickensian characters, we get rambling monologues about details of Russian life and the Russian character. In the middle of Chichikov's travels, the author stops to digress for a long, prolix paragraph about highways.
This may be to your taste, but being a story kind of guy, I wanted to find out what was going to come of Chichikov's schemes. I am less concerned with Gogol's concerns about the character of a long-ago nation, even if today's Russia, after revolutions and Sovietizations and fragmentation and Internetoligarchization does sometimes seem not so far removed from the Russia of Gogol and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
Well, this review did make me ramble a bit, didn't it? I guess I still can't quite put my finger on why Dead Souls fell flat for me, and given that it made me think so hard and dig up so many quotes, I guess it does what all excellent books are supposed to do, which is stir thoughts and conflict in the reader's mind. I'm still only giving it 3 stars, because it's just so boring for long stretches, and it's an unfinished novel, but if you are into classic Russian lit, or want to try some from the "second-stringers" (i.e., not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky), Dead Souls has humor and wit and the premise intrigues if the delivery is ultimately unsatisfactory.