Dead Souls

Chichikov is already reflecting on whether Colonel Koshkarev will prove as eccentric as the previous landowner he visited — a hint that earlier visits, now missing from the fragmentary manuscript, have already taken place. His koliaska arrives at the wrong estate. The fat, cheerful man hauling himself out of a fishing net in the lake is not Koshkarev but Peter Petrovitch Pietukh — a landowner whose life is organised entirely around food. He insists on hospitality, and hospitality in his case means a dinner of spectacular dimensions. Chichikov lies down that night hearing Pietukh dictate instructions for a pasty divided into four parts: into one division, the sturgeon's cheeks and viaziga; into another, buckwheat porridge, young mushrooms, onions, sweet milk, and calves' brains. He falls asleep before the list is finished. At Pietukh's Chichikov meets Platon Mikhalitch — a handsome, wealthy, thoroughly bored young landowner who complains that life holds no interest. Chichikov persuades him to join the journey; new places might rouse him from his lethargy. Platon agrees, and as a first destination proposes his brother-in-law's estate. The brother-in-law is Constantine Thedorovitch Kostanzhoglo. His estate announces itself by the quality of its planting, its squared-off and purposeful fields, its thriving peasants. His house is almost bare: no bronzes, no pictures, no china ornaments — everything designed for use. He has increased his income tenfold in eight years by knowing his soil, by turning every by-product into profit (wool into cloth, fish offal into glue), and by refusing all fashionable novelties whether from London or from St. Petersburg. Over dinner Kostanzhoglo delivers an extended lecture. He is against factories established purely for profit; against education for the peasant before prosperity; against political economy and its learned fools; against the philanthropy that builds schools and hospitals and ruins families. He is for agriculture, for knowing your land, for working it as it demands to be worked, for spending nothing beyond what the estate produces. Chichikov, fascinated, asks how a man with a new estate could grow wealthy as quickly as possible. Kostanzhoglo names a property nearby — Khlobuev's — available cheaply, ruined by its owner's extravagance. He would not buy it himself only because he has enough, and because buying distressed estates earns him a reputation as a miser and exploiter. The chapter ends with Chichikov meditating on purchasing Khlobuev's estate.