Teaching Dead Souls

Dead Souls opens with a fine spring chaise rolling into the provincial town of N. Inside sits Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a man of middling appearance, middling age, and entirely unmiddling ambitions. He spends his first days in town with practiced sociability, visiting the governor, the postmaster, the police-captain, the public prosecutor, leaving each with the impression that he is a thoroughly agreeable fellow. Then he sets out into the countryside. He is buying dead serfs.

The scheme is simple and audacious. Under imperial law, serfs are counted for taxation purposes on census rolls updated only every few years. Serfs who die between censuses remain on the rolls as "dead souls," and their owners continue paying tax on them until the next count. Chichikov proposes to buy legal title to these dead souls for a nominal price, freeing landowners of their tax burden. He will then present the accumulated serfs as living property and mortgage them against a country estate. The whole plan turns on paperwork. It is fraud made possible by bureaucracy, which is to say, the natural condition of Russian life made briefly visible.

The landowners Chichikov visits form a procession of the spiritually ruined. Manilov is all sentiment and nothing else, a man drowning in pleasant vagueness, his house stuffed with furniture in fabric he never finished choosing. Korobotchka, an elderly widow, cannot understand why anyone would buy what no longer exists, and haggles anyway. Nozdrev is loud, lying, drunk before noon, and nearly gets Chichikov killed. Sobakevitch, built like a bear, haggles like a merchant and slips a dead woman onto the list. Plushkin, last and worst, has retreated so far into hoarding that his house has become indistinguishable from his soul: both vast, both rotting, both empty of human warmth.

Back in town, Chichikov's purchases become public knowledge and rumor takes over. The town cannot agree on who he is or what he wants. One story has him planning to abduct the governor's daughter. Another casts him as Napoleon escaped from St. Helena in disguise. The public prosecutor, panicking for reasons he cannot explain, dies of fright.

In the final chapter of Volume One, Gogol steps back and tells us who Chichikov actually is. He was not born to anything. He made himself through patience, flattery, and an iron ability to suppress his desires in service of a longer plan. He is not a villain in the operatic sense. He is something more ordinary and more damning: a man formed entirely by the society that condemns him.

Gogol intended Dead Souls as the first panel of a Russian Divine Comedy, the Inferno, with Purgatorio and Paradiso to follow. He burned the manuscript of Volume Two in 1852, ten days before his death. Chapters 12 through 15 in this guide are surviving drafts from that burned volume: Tientietnikov's idle retreat, the General's explosive laughter, Kostanzhoglo's honest wealth beside bureaucratic madness, and an unfinished fragment that ends mid-scene. There is no completed ending; Gogol was attempting moral recovery in those pages and could not sustain it. The hell, apparently, was easier to write.