Acquisitiveness

Acquisitiveness is the defining drive behind Chichikov’s pursuit of money and advancement in Dead Souls. It begins not as an abstract vice but as an inherited rule: his father teaches him to save every kopeck and distrust the dependability of human companions. The adult Chichikov turns that lesson into a practical system, pursuing wealth as the means to a comfortable, elegant life. The narrator names him an “acquirer,” yet resists reducing him to a villain: acquisitiveness is both a socially familiar appetite for gain and a passion whose power to deform a person may, the narrator suggests, be bound up with the possibility of change.

Inherited Rule and Early Practice

The pattern is established in Chichikov’s childhood. When his father leaves him in town to attend school, he offers a few coins and a set of instructions: study diligently, please teachers, cultivate useful connections among richer classmates, avoid spending on others, and save. His final lesson makes money seem more dependable than friendship: even when a companion deserts someone in adversity, a kopeck will not. The father presents saving as the most important practical safeguard in life, and the boy retains the lesson after the two part, never to meet again.

At school, Chichikov displays no exceptional academic talent, but he is diligent, neat, and quick to understand practical advantage. He accepts gifts without returning them and sometimes sells what he has received. Rather than spend his small allowance, he adds to it by making and selling a painted wax bullfinch, trading food to hungry classmates, and training a mouse to perform tricks for a buyer. These episodes show acquisitiveness taking shape as both self-denial and initiative: he can forgo immediate pleasure, but he also looks for ways to turn objects, skills, and relationships into income. By the time his earnings reach five roubles, he has made one purse and begun filling another.

Wealth as an Imagined Future

The narrator clarifies that Chichikov is not simply attached to money for its own sake, nor is he portrayed as a naturally miserly hoarder. Money matters because it seems to promise a particular life: carriages, an elegantly furnished house, and refined dinners. The difference is important. His restraint is severe, but it is directed toward an imagined future of comfort and distinction rather than toward the pleasure of keeping coins untouched.

That vision governs his response to the world around him. A wealthy man passing in a fine carriage leaves a lasting impression, and Chichikov associates visible prosperity with the possibility of having secured success. On leaving school, he is eager to enter the Civil Service; after difficulty, he obtains a minor appointment paying only thirty or forty roubles a year. He responds to the low salary not by abandoning his ambitions but by working with unusual persistence, copying documents from early morning until late at night and accepting meagre arrangements for sleep and meals. His self-command and attention to neatness accompany, rather than contradict, his desire for advancement: he is preparing himself to rise.

Acquisition Through Office and Deception

Once Chichikov wins a chief clerk’s position through the confidence of a senior official, he abruptly leaves that man’s household and ends the implied prospect of marriage that had helped secure the older man’s support. He nevertheless continues to behave courteously toward him in public. The episode presents advancement as a transaction in which apparent intimacy can be useful and then discarded, while social politeness remains available after the practical connection has ended.

In later service, Chichikov gains promotion to a lucrative post and turns its opportunities to advantage. When scrutiny of bribery begins, he does not withdraw from the system; he adapts his method. He initially refuses a petitioner’s offered reward with assurances that the matter will be handled as a duty, and sends the visitor away expecting prompt action. The documents do not arrive, and the petitioner eventually learns that the work has not even begun. Only after further delay does the petitioner hear that something must be given to the copyists. Chichikov’s performance of integrity therefore helps conceal and facilitate the extraction of payment: he converts the appearance of disinterested service into a more effective route to gain.

This pattern distinguishes his acquisitiveness from simple, open greed. He studies how institutions work and how other people read appearances, then uses delay, courtesy, and intermediaries to secure an advantage. His resourcefulness operates inside a corrupt administrative environment, but the narrator makes clear that Chichikov is an active user of its practices, not merely their passive victim.

Setback, Justification, and the Dead-Soul Scheme

After a major setback, Chichikov is angry and discouraged, but he does not give up the hope of acquiring wealth. He asks himself why misfortune has fallen on him, arguing that he has not wronged the poor or dispossessed widows and that he has taken advantage only of people with more than their share. He also reasons that others would have profited in his place. The self-questioning exposes a moral logic by which he measures wrongdoing comparatively: not by whether his conduct is honest, but by whether someone else might have done worse or gained the same advantage.

His thoughts of future children intensify this reasoning. He worries about leaving them nothing and imagines them judging their father for failing to provide. The narrator remarks that this recurring concern may have helped draw him deeper into the affair. Chichikov grieves over his circumstances, yet continues to watch for opportunity; once he finds a new course, he resumes work, accepts a meaner way of living, and takes up the poorly regarded occupation of attorney.

The decisive idea comes through that work. Chichikov is handling a case involving peasants from a ruined estate, some of whom have died but remain entered on the revision lists. When an official explains that one registered person may effectively be replaced by another before a new list is made, Chichikov sees a way to turn this bureaucratic discrepancy into capital. He plans to buy deceased peasants from landowners who would prefer to stop paying the poll tax on them, then present the names as a population to be transferred to land in Kherson. He imagines borrowing two hundred roubles per person from the Council of Public Trust and raising a capital of two hundred thousand roubles. The plan depends on the interval before a new revision list, a legal-looking transfer, and a fabricated confirmation of settlement. Acquisitiveness here becomes a scheme that converts administrative records and human deaths into prospective financial assets.

The Narrator’s Moral Reframing

The narrator explicitly proposes “acquirer” as a fairer description of Chichikov than “villain.” The label does not excuse his actions: the narrator recognizes that the love of acquisition gives rise to transactions that are not strictly honourable. Instead, it places Chichikov’s conduct within a broader account of ordinary human desire. A reader who might accept such a person socially could recoil when he appears as a fictional protagonist, but the narrator asks that the character be examined rather than dismissed at once.

That invitation widens the subject from Chichikov’s personal motives to the instability of human character. The narrator describes passions as capable of taking hold of a person, displacing sacred obligations and making trivial pursuits seem of supreme importance. The contrast is not between people who have passions and people who do not, but between passions that diminish their bearer and those that grow toward beneficence. Some passions, the narrator allows, may be inseparable from a person’s nature and may reach an eventual fulfilment that cannot yet be judged: even in Chichikov’s coldness, a potential for a different future is left open.

Acquisitiveness thus supplies both the practical engine of Chichikov’s rise and the novel’s moral problem. Its early forms—saving coins, trading food, selling a trained mouse—develop into bureaucratic maneuvering and finally the dead-soul plan. Yet the narrative does not treat that progression as proof that a person is fixed forever. It exposes the damage caused when gain becomes the governing measure of conduct while preserving, in the narrator’s speculative account of passion, the possibility that the same human material might one day be transformed.