The Forbidden Fountain of Oz food, which occurs most famously in the "forbidden fruit" of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Book of Genesis, but in other contexts too. The idea of water that purges the drinker's memory is also ancient. In Greek mythology it occurs as the river Lethe: the souls of the dead lose their memories of their earthly lives by drinking its water. The same idea can also be found in Eastern and other literatures, as in the "Well of the Waters of Forgetfulness" and other guises. "The 'Drink of Forgetfulness' is found in Greek, Hindu, Norse, and
Dead Souls remembered. In their studies of Gogol, Andrey Bely, D. S. Mirsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and other modernist critics rejected the commonly held view of "Dead Souls" as a reformist or satirical work. For instance, Nabokov regarded the plot of "Dead Souls" as unimportant and Gogol as a great writer whose works skirted the irrational and whose prose style combined superb descriptive power with a disregard for novelistic clichés. True, Chichikov displays a most extraordinary moral rot, but the whole idea of buying and selling dead souls is, to Nabokov, ridiculous on its face; therefore, the provincial setting of the novel is