The Miser's Mansion of Decay — Dead Souls

A peasant's profanity sends Chichikov toward Plushkin's village, where wooden pavements bounce the britchka like piano keys and huts stand roofless because rain enters in bucketfuls. Plushkin looks like a beggar at a church door yet owns a thousand souls and storehouses stuffed with grain, cloth, and fish. Gogol recalls that Plushkin was once a careful manager and father until grief and isolation turned thrift into rot. When Chichikov offers to pay taxes on dead serfs, Plushkin reports eighty deaths since the last revision and a hundred and twenty souls still taxed. Sympathy does not put anything into one's pocket, he snaps, yet he accepts help when Chichikov frames it as deeds, not charity.

A figure in flour-stained clothes appears at the gate; Chichikov asks for the master and learns the answer when the man says he is blind not to see that _I_ am the master. His parlor is a museum of hoarding: a clock without a pendulum, a dried lemon shrunken to a hazelnut, flies drowned in a tumbler, a chandelier bagged in dusty holland. Chichikov praises his genius for method; Plushkin mutters that the devil may fly away with such sentiments but still offers a seat because Russian hospitality demands it even of misers. They haggle runaways at twenty-five kopecks, then thirty-two; Plushkin watches Proshka like a thief, orders Mavra to scrape sugar rather than waste it, and cancels tea once the samovar is ready to save the cost.

Paperwork consumes the cupboard: Plushkin hunts a list among cups and cobwebs, offers liquor from a bug-filled decanter Chichikov refuses, and dictates a letter to the President, his old schoolfellow, because he cannot leave thieves alone at home. Mavra is accused of stealing writing paper until the sheet appears under his nose; he seals the letter with a tallow candle to save wax. Chichikov leaves with a list of a hundred and twenty dead names plus seventy-eight fugitives, whistling home while Plushkin plans to bequeath a damaged silver watch rather than give it now. The chapter's comedy is that the province's greatest miser becomes Chichikov's richest supplier; hoarding that starves the living enriches a man who trades in the dead.