Dead Souls

The last surviving fragment of Dead Souls arrives with gaps already in it — Volume Two, Chapter IV, broken off before its conclusion. Chichikov visits Khlobuev's estate with Kostanzhoglo and Platon. Khlobuev has a crooked cravat, a stained frockcoat, and a boot with a hole in it. He is delighted to see anyone, since most people avoid him for fear he will ask for money. Kostanzhoglo offers to lend Chichikov ten thousand roubles at no interest to help purchase the property, lecturing on the improvements a capable man could make if he actually worked the land. The deal is arranged. Chichikov continues his rounds. He meets Platon's brother Vassili — darker, more animated, less bored than Platon — and his old-fashioned household with its benches under lime trees and remarkable kvass. He mediates a land dispute involving a newcomer named Lienitsin who has seized a piece of ground traditionally used by the village for festivals. Visiting Lienitsin, Chichikov charms his wife by playing with the baby (the baby promptly ruins his frockcoat) and secures from Lienitsin a deal for dead souls, presented as a favour between friends of mature age who know how to keep their own counsel. Then Gogol tells us, in summary, that Chichikov's tour went well and that money accumulated. Then: arrest. The charge is a fraudulent will — a rich widow's estate, a woman who impersonated the deceased, and a tangle of legal documents that reach the Governor-General's office in such quantities that even his best secretary nearly loses his reason trying to follow the thread. In his cell, Chichikov is a broken man. He sobs, tears his frockcoat off his shoulders, pulls out his hair by handfuls. The old millionaire Murazov — a man who made his fortune in tax-farming and spent it on good works — visits him and speaks quietly. Murazov says: "What could not each of us rise to be did we but devote to good ends the same measure of energy and of patience which we bestow upon unworthy objects!" The corrupt tchinovnik Samosvitov arrives separately and offers complete exoneration for thirty thousand roubles. Chichikov shakes his hand. By the end of the day his dispatch-box and papers are back in his cell. The manuscript ends here. Gogol burned the remaining chapters of Volume Two in 1852, ten days before his death.