Chichikov’s deal with Plushkin

Chichikov’s deal with Plushkin is a two-part purchase that makes the bookkeeping logic of the dead-soul scheme starkly visible: deceased peasants remain taxable entries, while 78 runaway serfs become another set of names to bargain over. Chichikov presents the first transaction as practical assistance, offering to assume taxes Plushkin would otherwise owe; he then takes a list of 120 dead peasants and pays a small sum for the fugitives. The scene moves from a promise of relief to a precise reckoning, showing how census status, tax liability, and the cost of an estate’s decline can be made to serve a speculator’s design.

The scheme behind the bargain

In the system governing the transaction, a periodic census fixed the serfs for whom an owner remained liable until a new revision. Someone who had died after the census could still appear on the rolls, leaving the owner to pay tax on a person no longer alive. At the same time, such a name could have financial use: the scheme Chichikov devised was to buy dead serfs cheaply, assemble a fictitious population, and mortgage it to raise capital. The bargain with Plushkin turns that abstract opportunity into a meeting between a tax-burdened landowner and a buyer ready to take over the liability.

Chichikov’s proposal also grows out of earlier experience with estate administration. While working as an attorney on behalf of the Public Trustee, he encountered a ruined estate whose peasants were entered on the revision lists despite deaths caused by disease and other misfortunes. An official’s response—that one dead soul would eventually be replaced by another born and grown to take its place—helped Chichikov recognize the gap between a person’s life and the administrative record. He later reasoned that landowners might surrender dead names to escape the poll tax, while he could present his purchases as transfers to a settlement in Kherson. The transaction with Plushkin makes that gap profitable in practice.

Tax relief presented as benevolence

Chichikov tells Plushkin that his sympathy is not merely verbal: he is prepared to take over the tax obligation attached to the deceased peasants. The offer astonishes Plushkin, who asks whether Chichikov has served in the military; Chichikov cautiously answers that his service was civil. When Plushkin understands that the proposal could bring him relief, he exclaims in delight and calls Chichikov a benefactor. The emotion quickly vanishes from his face, however, and he returns to his habitual caution, asking for the terms to be stated again.

The proposed legal form makes the fiction explicit. Chichikov says that they will draw up a deed as though the peasants were still alive and Plushkin had sold them to him. In this arrangement, the transfer of names and the transfer of tax responsibility are treated as a sale of living people even though the people in question have died. Plushkin’s first concern is not the moral or legal contradiction but the expense of lawyers, whom he suspects of charging excessive fees. He asks whether Chichikov will pay the tax to him or to the Treasury, seeking to pin down how the promised relief will operate.

A list of the dead, and a hundred and twenty names

Once Chichikov agrees to complete the business, he asks for a list. Plushkin initially searches among the household papers and possessions, eventually finding a dusty decanter but not the document. He refuses to go into town, distrustful of his servants and reluctant to leave the house. The transaction is shaped by this suspicion: he wants to settle it immediately, since a man could be alive one day and dead the next, but Chichikov needs the list before the bargain can be completed.

Plushkin finally remembers that he prepared a list for the next revision. Wearing spectacles, he rummages through packages of papers and pulls out a much-scribbled document. Its crowded names, likened by the narrator to a cloud of midges, number 120. Chichikov grins at the multitude and puts the list in his pocket. The precise tally transforms the offer from a vague promise into a substantial acquisition: the dead peasants are gathered into a document that can be carried away and used in the next stage of Chichikov’s plan.

The fugitives and the price of absence

The deal expands when Plushkin asks whether Chichikov knows anyone who might want some runaway serfs. He says that his son-in-law has reported their disappearance but believes their tracks have grown cold; in Plushkin’s account, the son-in-law is a military man unsuited to presenting a case in court. Chichikov immediately asks how many there are. Plushkin first answers approximately, then corrects the number to 78, explaining that some abscond each year. He complains that the serfs are gluttonous and idle even as he says he scarcely has enough to eat, and offers to accept whatever price Chichikov chooses.

The contrast between the dead peasants and the runaways is crucial to the bargain. The first group exists for the transaction as names still subject to tax; the second consists of people who have left the estate but remain countable as a potential commodity. Plushkin says that a living serf on the census list is worth 500 roubles, but Chichikov does not offer anything close to that. He begins by proposing 25 kopecks per soul, then adds five kopecks and fixes the rate at 30. Plushkin tries to press for two kopecks more, but Chichikov refuses.

Arithmetic, payment, and the transaction’s meaning

Chichikov works out the total for the 78 runaways as 24 roubles and 96 kopecks. A note attached to the calculation points out that the correct sum at 30 kopecks apiece is 23 roubles and 40 kopecks, so the arithmetic costs Chichikov 1 rouble and 56 kopecks. The discrepancy punctures the appearance of exact commercial mastery without undoing the bargain: Plushkin makes out a receipt, and Chichikov pays in cash. Plushkin takes the money in both hands, carries it carefully to his bureau, looks around, and stores it in one of his money bags.

The purchase gathers two kinds of absence into one speculative account. Chichikov assumes the taxes on the dead, giving Plushkin immediate relief from the burden of the names that remain on the rolls; he also buys the fugitives cheaply, using their continuing status in the census system to treat their absence as an asset. Plushkin’s eagerness to conserve money and Chichikov’s practiced calculation meet within a legal and fiscal order that treats recorded status as more consequential than actual presence. The result is not simply a deal between two individuals: it is a portrait of a system in which a dead person can remain a taxable soul, a runaway can be priced as a soul, and a list can carry financial value independent of the lives it records.