The burned second and never written third volume of Nikolai Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” is one of the most mysterious pages in the history of Russian literature, giving rise to a rich mythology that continues to reproduce itself to this day. Based on memoirs and archival data, Ekaterina Dmitrieva reconstructs various aspects of this story: from the origin of the author's plan to the burning of the poem and the almost detective discovery of an early edition of five chapters from the second volume six months after Gogol's death. The author talks about the supposed sources of the continuation of “Dead Souls,” as well as the restoration of the lost chapters, made possible thanks to the memories of contemporaries who listened to Gogol read the complete edition of the second part. Separate sections of the book talk about mystifications and stylizations, the emergence of which in the 19th–20th and 21st centuries was facilitated by the disappearance of Gogol’s manuscript and the revision of the famous thesis about Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which allegedly served as inspiration for the three-part architectonics of “Dead Souls.” Ekaterina Dmitrieva – Doctor of Philology, head of the Department of Russian Classical Literature at the Institute of Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, member of the academic group for the publication of the Complete Works and Letters of N. V. Gogol, leading researcher at the Institute of Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.