Chichikov’s attempt to obtain souls through Koshkarev’s estate offices

Chichikov’s attempt to obtain souls through Koshkarev’s estate offices is a comic collision between a direct, fraudulent purpose and a bureaucracy that can make even failure appear procedurally accomplished. Chichikov wants dead serfs represented as alive so that their purchase can be confirmed; Colonel Koshkarev answers with forms, offices, and a report whose elaborate reasoning ends by denying that any unencumbered souls are available. The effort produces no purchase, only an exhausting demonstration of administrative machinery congratulating itself for working.

The request and its bureaucratic route

Chichikov arrives at the Colonel’s estate seeking a few souls and confirmation of their purchase. After listening to the Colonel’s expansive claims about reform—including the idea that German dress for Russian peasants would advance science and trade—Chichikov tries to bring the conversation back to his narrow business. He has no interest in the Colonel’s larger programme: he wants to acquire a few souls and have the transaction confirmed.

The Colonel translates this request into a “Statement of Plea.” Chichikov agrees, but balks when Koshkarev outlines the route: the Office for the Reception of Reports and Returns will consider the document and send it back to him; he will forward it to the Estate Works Committee; that body will revise it and present it to the Administrator, who will act jointly with the Secretary. Each step promises another step, while the practical request remains suspended inside the chain.

Chichikov attempts to cut through the delay by stating the matter aloud. The souls he wants are dead, he explains, but for his purpose they must be represented as alive. Koshkarev instead tells him to put the distinction into the petition, specifying that the souls are “so to speak, dead” and that they must be represented as alive. Without such documentary process, he insists, the matter cannot proceed. He also appoints a Commissioner to escort Chichikov through the offices, converting a simple transaction into a guided passage through administrative procedure.

The report turns the request against itself

The Colonel later announces that everything has been carried through in due form and praises the Commissioner’s supposed genius. He reads aloud the resulting report, which treats Chichikov’s wording as a problem to be interpreted rather than a request to be fulfilled. Its first argument says that the petitioner has mistakenly called the souls “Dead”: from the context, the report claims, he must mean souls approaching death, since the soul itself is deathless. The theological-sounding correction makes Chichikov’s practical fraud vanish into a dispute over terminology.

The report’s second finding blocks the transaction on financial grounds. No unmortgaged souls exist on the estate, it says, because all have been pledged under a first mortgage and again under a second, at one hundred and fifty roubles per soul. The sole exception is the village of Gurmailovka, entangled in a suit against its landowner, Priadistchev; a court caveat, published in issue 42 of the Moscow Gazette, has brought that village within the jurisdiction of the court in question. These exact legal and monetary particulars give the refusal the appearance of exhaustive investigation, though the report’s central effect is simply to establish that Chichikov cannot obtain the souls he sought.

Exit and the Colonel’s triumph

Chichikov furiously asks why Koshkarev did not tell him of the mortgages earlier, since the entire journey through procedure has wasted his time. The Colonel answers that it was necessary for Chichikov to view the matter through documentary process: inexperienced people, he maintains, must not merely perceive things subconsciously but must see them consciously. The explanation makes the delay sound like instruction, as though the futile process had been valuable because it forced the petitioner to understand the obstacle in official form.

At last Chichikov’s patience breaks. He seizes his cap, abandons ceremony, and rushes out through the courtyard. The driver has not even taken the horses out, having learned from experience that doing so would require a separate Statement of Plea for fodder and a twenty-four-hour wait for its approval. The joke carries the Colonel’s system beyond the offices: even feeding the horses would have to be authorized before it could happen.

Koshkarev pursues Chichikov to the gates, warmly presses his hand, and thanks him for giving the Colonel an opportunity to demonstrate proper estate management. He concludes that affairs must be kept moving and circulating or the administrative machine will grow rusty. His proposed remedy is another committee, the Committee of Supervision of the Committee of Management, charged with detecting backsliders in the first committee. Thus the multiplication of oversight is offered as a cure for the very inertia the procedure has produced.

Meaning of the failed application

The episode’s central reversal is that Chichikov’s scheme depends on turning the dead into administratively living property, while Koshkarev’s offices turn that simple deception into an ostensibly rational question of wording, jurisdiction, and mortgage status. The report even redirects the word “Dead” toward the theological claim that the soul is deathless, but its final obstacle is not metaphysical: the souls are already pledged. Official language expands around the request without changing its practical outcome.

The horses, left harnessed while fodder awaits authorization, make the machinery’s consequences concrete. The estate’s procedures do not merely frustrate Chichikov’s business; they delay an ordinary necessity, then interpret the resulting delay as evidence that more oversight is needed. Chichikov leaves tired and dissatisfied, with no souls acquired, while Koshkarev is left satisfied that his system has been displayed. The failed application therefore closes not with a transaction but with a self-perpetuating administrative proposal: another committee to supervise the committees already at work.