Dead Souls

Next morning, a lady in a plaid cloak descends from an orange-coloured house into a koliaska and proceeds to her bosom friend's at a pace she finds agonisingly slow. The fronts of the houses appear to her longer than usual; the white stone hospital seems interminable. She has news. After a conversation about chintz that cannot be rushed, she delivers it. Korobotchka has arrived in town and told the Archpriest's wife that a man appeared at dead of night, knocked until the gates shook, and forced her to sign papers selling him her dead serfs. The two ladies deliberate. The dead souls are not the point, concludes the hostess; the dead souls are an invention to conceal something else. The real object: to abduct the Governor's daughter. By noon the theory has spread across the town. The ladies' camp organises rapidly and with perfect internal consistency. The Governor's wife, offended as a mother, bans Chichikov from the house and subjects her daughter — innocent — to an unpleasant conversation. The male faction splits: some believe the abduction story; others insist the dead souls are the real mystery and constitute something contrary to good order and discipline. Complicating matters: a new Governor-General has just been appointed to the province. The entire class of tchinovniks goes pale at the thought that reports of the present scandal might reach him. Then two documents arrive simultaneously — one about a forger of ruble notes operating under various aliases; the second about a criminal who has evaded arrest in a neighbouring province, with orders to detain any suspicious individual who cannot produce references or a passport. The officials, already agitated, are now thunderstruck. Who exactly is Chichikov? They make enquiries. Korobotchka: garrulous, provides nothing useful except that he also promised to buy some lard for the Treasury. Manilov: delivers an extended eulogy on Chichikov's qualities of soul, with sentiments on friendship, and reveals nothing. Sobakevitch: Chichikov is an excellent fellow, the souls he sold were in the truest sense alive, and that is all he will say. They interrogate the servants. Petrushka offers the distinctive smell of his room. Selifan says the barin served in the Customs. The tchinovniks resolve to hold a debate, at the Chief of Police's house, on the question of who Chichikov can possibly be.