Russian tech firm Yandex's AI rewrites lost second volume of Gogol's 'Dead Souls'

Yandex's AI chatbot GigaChat has produced a 464-page reconstruction of the lost second volume of Nikolay Gogol's novel "Dead Souls," which the Russian author burned days before his death in 1852. The project, which took more than two years to complete, includes roughly 350 pages of text under the title "Dead Souls. Volume Two. Rebirth," along with illustrations generated by GigaChat itself. Editing of the book was handled by Vladislav Otroshenko, winner of the 2003 Yasnaya Polyana Prize. To train the system, the team fed it Gogol's completed and unfinished works, his notes and more than 1,500 letters. The five draft chapters found in the writer's desk after his death were not used; the team chose instead to have the model generate the text from scratch. The project represents one of the most extensive attempts so far to use generative AI to recreate a missing chapter of a major literary work, drawing on a writer's full body of correspondence and drafts to shape the model's output. No further publication or translation plans were immediately announced.