Chichikov’s arrest and imprisonment

Chichikov’s arrest and imprisonment convert the long-running threat of legal exposure into a physical fall from display and self-fashioning to confinement and remorse. The scene begins just as he admires his new clothes before a mirror; it ends with him in a damp, unheated cell, separated from his papers and ill-gotten property. The abrupt reversal makes his arrest both a consequence of the frauds recorded against him and a test of whether fear and loss can awaken moral recognition.

The Summons and the Prince’s Accusation

Chichikov is still enjoying his fashionable appearance when spurred heels clatter in the hall and a gendarme announces that he must present himself before the Governor-General. The uniformed messenger, with helmet, plume, crossed belts, and sword, seems to him almost an army compressed into one person. A second gendarme waits outside, and a coach is ready beneath the window. There is no space to prepare or evade the summons: Chichikov, still wearing his smoked-grey suit with flame-coloured highlights, is taken under guard to the Governor-General’s residence.

The arrest acquires its legal and moral weight in the Prince’s study, among portfolios, ledgers, and dispatch-boxes. Chichikov imagines that he will be sent to Siberia without a trial, while the Prince accuses him of returning to fraud after having once been spared imprisonment. The accusation makes clemency part of the charge: the Prince says he had allowed Chichikov to remain in town, only for him to resume a dishonourable career.

The immediate disclosure concerns the woman who witnessed a certain will. The Prince tells Chichikov that she has been arrested and that he will be confronted with her. Chichikov’s sight seems to dim; he asks what fraud is meant, then offers to tell the whole truth and admits guilt, while claiming that rascals led him astray. The Prince rejects that defense, saying that numerous felonies stand against his name and that he has never earned a kopeck except through trickery and theft. He orders Chichikov taken to prison until trial.

Arrest, Pleading, and Humiliation

Chichikov answers the order not with a legal defense but with appeals for mercy. He asks the Prince to spare him for the sake of his aged mother and invokes the Prince’s family. He also acknowledges that he lied about possessing a wife and children, yet insists that he had desired a family and the respect of his fellows and the authorities. In his account, circumstances and enemies repeatedly forced him to find a living by whatever means were available; he compares his life to a barque tossed by stormy waves.

His plea becomes a physical performance of abasement. Tears pour down his face, and he falls at the Prince’s feet in the very clothes he had just admired: the smoked-grey frockcoat, velvet waistcoat, satin tie, and carefully fitted breeches. The fragrant eau-de-Cologne on his neatly brushed head follows him into this scene of desperation. The contrast between the immaculate outfit and his collapse exposes the distance between the social image he cultivates and the helplessness of the accused man.

The Prince is unmoved. He orders the gendarmes to summon an escort and remove the prisoner. Chichikov clasps the Prince’s knees; when the Prince struggles to free himself and repeats the order, Chichikov clings to his leg so tenaciously that he is dragged along the floor. His insistence that he will not leave until shown mercy cannot reverse the command. The scene thus stages a sharp shift in power: the man who has tried to maneuver through fraud and persuasion is physically carried away by the authority he cannot bargain with.

Confinement and the Loss of the Dispatch-Box

The cell replaces the polished surfaces and fashionable costume of Chichikov’s brief triumph with an inventory of deprivation. It is damp and mouldy, reeks of soldiers’ boots and leggings, and contains an unvarnished table, two poor chairs, a barred window, and a broken stove that lets smoke escape without giving warmth. The details make imprisonment a bodily condition rather than an abstract legal penalty: Chichikov is shut behind a grating in a room that offers neither comfort nor relief.

He has not been permitted to take even his necessities. More consequentially, his dispatch-box, containing his booty, is gone, and the deeds to the dead souls are in the hands of a government clerk. The documents that had served his scheme as instruments of acquisition are now evidence held by officials. His arrest therefore removes not only his liberty but also his immediate command over the papers and property on which his plans depended.

Left to think of what has been taken from him, Chichikov rolls about the floor as remorse gnaws at his heart. His despair becomes so intense that he decides another twenty-four hours of such misery would leave no Chichikov in the world. The episode does not establish that his remorse has already become lasting reform; it shows instead that imprisonment, separation from his papers, and the collapse of his hopes have brought him to a crisis of self-understanding.

Significance and Immediate Aftermath

The arrest strips away the performance that opened the episode. In front of the mirror, Chichikov treated each part of his suit as an element in an elegant composition; before the Prince, the same clothes mark the conspicuous contrast between his cultivated appearance and the poor prisoners in smocks and sheepskins. His polished exterior cannot protect him from the charges, the Prince’s judgment, or the gendarmes’ hands.

The episode also brings two threads of accusation together: the Prince’s prior clemency and the newly exposed will affair. The Prince presents the arrest as a response to both Chichikov’s accumulated felonies and his return to fraud after being spared. The detained witness makes the case concrete, while the seized deeds connect the legal crisis to the dead-soul transactions themselves. Chichikov’s own account of being driven by circumstance does not change the outcome: he is taken to prison and left without his documents.

Yet the cell is not the final beat of the scene. An hour after Chichikov arrives, the prison doors open to admit Murazov, whose arrival brings him relief so profound that the narrative compares it with a thirsty, dusty traveller receiving clear spring water. The contrast does not cancel the arrest or resolve the charges; it marks the beginning of a new encounter within confinement, after Chichikov has been stripped of his possessions and brought face to face with remorse.