Dead Souls

The departure Chichikov planned does not go smoothly. Selifan has not had the horses shod, the wheel needs a tyre, and the britchka is rickety. After a furious exchange Chichikov orders the necessary repairs, and the britchka finally passes through the gates. On the way out they encounter the Public Prosecutor's funeral procession. Chichikov draws back the curtains briefly, then continues. Gogol steps forward to address his reader. He has chosen a rascal for a hero, he acknowledges, because the virtuous individual has been ridden to death in Russian fiction. It is time to yoke a rascal to the shafts. What follows is Chichikov's complete history. Born of minor nobility into a cramped household — a tiny room, an invalid father who paced and spat into a sandbox — he arrived at school with the father's parting advice: keep every kopeck; make friends only with the rich; never entertain, let others entertain you. At school he sold food from under the desk to rich classmates, trained a mouse and sold it, mastered the art of anticipating his teacher's movements. Each subsequent government post he worked with precision, finding who needed flattery and who needed money. He befriended a department head's ugly daughter to secure a promotion, then abandoned her once transferred. He joined a Building Commission where the official building stayed at basement level for six years while each commissioner built himself a fine private home. He was caught, survived better than his colleagues, climbed again. In the Customs Department he proved exceptional — could determine a roll's weight by touch, had the nose of a bloodhound, maintained perfect urbanity while searching suspects. He devised a scheme with a colleague to pass contraband for 500,000 roubles. They were caught. He lost everything except ten thousand roubles, two servants, and his britchka. Working as an attorney, handling the mortgaging of a ruined estate's serfs, it came to him: dead peasants remain on census rolls until the next revision. Buy them cheaply from landowners grateful to shed the poll-tax. Present them to the Council of Public Trust as living serfs. Collect two hundred roubles a head. Transfer them, on paper, to land in Kherson. That is the scheme. The britchka rolls away. Gogol closes with his great image of Russia as a bird-troika hurtling through space — overtaking everything — while other nations watch and stand aside.