The purpose of this paper is to take a look at the poetics reflected in the illustrations to Gogol’s Dead Souls and to find out the relation between the literary text and the illustrations. First, the focus will be on the painters’ viewpoint when they converted Gogol’s literary text into illustrations and on how they understood the poetic meaning of Gogol’s epic. Second, the function of the illustration as an interpretation of the literary text will be discussed. This study tries to find out the meaning of the literary text through the transition of Gogol’s literary text into illustrative texts and through the illustrations themselves.