The article deals with the eschatological sense of the first volume of “Dead Souls”. It is shown that the universal spiritual mortification, which turns the characters into soulless flesh, is the necessary boundary of spiritual resurrection not only of the characters of the poem, but of the entire Russian world. It is based on the transformation of the separated from each other and therefore motionless figures in the universal and eternal vortex movement of Russia - “non-overtaken troika”.

The article deals with the eschatological implication in the early works by N.V. Gogol, reveals the position of the generic world in the work “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” between two opposite threats: chthonic and sociocultural. The author states their connection with the figurative system of prosaic genres of the Slavic folklore and the Ukrainian folk thoughts.