Dead Souls

The road into Plushkin's village tells you everything before you meet him. The huts have grown dark with age, roofs riddled with holes, some reduced to the bare rib-like framework, their laths apparently removed by inhabitants who found no particular reason to stay indoors. The planks of the road rise and fall like piano keys; a bruise on the forehead is likely. The figure who shuffles out of the house to meet Chichikov appears at first to be a woman, then, on closer inspection, something else entirely: a man whose coat has four dangling posterior tails instead of two, with something wrapped around his neck that could be a stocking, a garter, or a stomacher, but is certainly not a tie. His small eyes twinkle under overhanging brows like mice peering from their holes. Chichikov would have given him a copper at a church door. He is, in fact, Plushkin — a landowner of over a thousand serfs, with storehouses crammed with grain and homespun cloth and dried fish. His rooms are a monument to hoarding. A table holds a cracked marble press, a dried lemon shrunken to the size of a hazelnut, a tumbler with three flies drowned in liquid covered by a sheet of notepaper, a broken chair arm, two ink-encrusted pens, and a yellow toothpick. A chandelier hangs in a dust-covered holland bag that looks like a cocoon. In one corner a pile of objects so deep in dust that touching it would turn your hand into a glove. Gogol pauses here for one of the novel's most affecting passages: Plushkin was not always this way. He was once a diligent, hospitable manager, a devoted father, a careful farmer whose neighbours came to learn from him. Then his wife died. His daughters married against his wishes. His son took to gambling and the army. He was left alone, and what had been ordinary thrift curdled into something else entirely. Chichikov raises his proposal. Plushkin has a hundred and twenty dead souls and roughly seventy runaways whose tracks have grown cold. He agrees to sell both at twenty-five kopecks per soul, then haggles upward for a few kopecks more. The paperwork requires a letter to the President of the Council, who was Plushkin's schoolfellow. For a moment something like warmth crosses the old man's face — and then, just as quickly, disappears.