Chichikov’s plan to buy “dead souls”

Chichikov’s plan to buy “dead souls” is the fraud that propels his journey through Russia: he seeks to turn deceased peasants who remain on the census rolls into collateral, then use the money to build a fortune. Its comic strangeness rests on a grimly practical system in which people are counted for taxes and credit after death, and where a document can make a fiction administratively usable.

The Census as an Economic Mechanism

Under serfdom, a landowner’s standing could be measured by the number of “souls” he possessed. Periodic censuses fixed those numbers, sometimes for a decade or two; until another census, owners remained liable for taxes on peasants who had died in the meantime. Yet those same census entries could also support loans: dead peasants, like living ones, could be pledged to a bank. The system therefore left owners paying for the dead while preserving their recorded value as assets.

Chichikov’s scheme exploits both sides of that arrangement. By buying the deceased peasants at reduced prices, he would relieve their owners of the continuing tax burden and acquire a list of fictitious serfs. He intended to mortgage that list for a substantial sum, then use the proceeds to buy an estate and living serfs—the beginnings of a fortune built on paper claims to people who no longer existed.

From a Work Assignment to a Scheme

The idea takes shape in Chichikov’s earlier work as an attorney. He is assigned to transfer several hundred peasants from a ruined estate to the Public Trustee. The property’s decline has multiple causes: cattle disease, corrupt bailiffs, failed harvests, epidemics that killed skilled workers, and the owner’s extravagance, including an expensive house in Moscow. As part of the legal process, Chichikov explains that many of the peasants are dead but still appear on the revision lists.

A secretary treats the discrepancy as an ordinary feature of population accounting: one person dies, another is born, and eventually a replacement grows up. Chichikov recognizes a business opportunity in that casual logic. If a public institution might pay for recorded souls before a new revision, then landowners struggling with taxes might willingly surrender their deceased peasants. He reasons that the recent epidemic has increased the available supply, while indebted or poorly managed estates give owners a reason to sell.

The plan also depends on concealing its real purpose. Chichikov knows that buying or mortgaging landless peasants is illegal, so he proposes to describe the transaction as a transfer to another province. He imagines claiming land in Taurida or Kherson, where settlement would supposedly be cheap, and providing formal confirmation of the removal. Even the projected village is to receive a name derived from his own: Chichikovoe, or Pavlovskoe. The intended transfer is fictitious, but he wants its paperwork to look exact.

The Proposal and Its Legal Appearance

At the home of Manilov, Chichikov presents the plan as a request to purchase peasants, then clarifies that he wants dead ones: people Manilov returned as alive at the last census. Manilov drops his pipe and studies his guest, unsure whether he is hearing a joke or witnessing madness. Chichikov’s composure gives no sign of either. The scene makes the scheme’s central contradiction explicit: the men are discussing the purchase of the dead as if it were an ordinary property transaction.

Chichikov insists that the acquired souls should be recorded as living because that is how they appear in the census returns. He presents his conduct as strictly within civil law, claiming that he never steps outside it and regards obligation as sacred. The claim is part of the scheme’s disguise: the substance of the transaction is fraudulent, while its success depends on keeping each procedural step in a legally recognizable form. When Manilov asks about payment, Chichikov turns to the price; Manilov instead offers the souls unconditionally and proposes to bear the sale’s expenses. The transaction’s absurdity is matched by its practical ease.

Paperwork, Negotiation, and Institutional Friction

The scheme takes different forms in dealings with other landowners. Sobakevitch prepares a list notable for its neatness and detail: alongside each serf’s trade, age, and pedigree, he adds remarks about conduct and sobriety. The dead are presented not as a vague mass but as individually described entries capable of being checked, priced, and transferred. Chichikov refuses to hand over earnest money immediately, proposing instead to pay the lump sum when they reach town.

Registration then brings the paper fiction into contact with public administration. At the municipal offices, Chichikov asks where serf-indenture business is conducted and submits an application. He presents purchases from several landowners, provides the purchase list, and says that some vendors are present while others have supplied powers of attorney. When he asks to complete the matter that day, the official Ivan Antonovitch says further proof is required to show that no impediments exist. Chichikov invokes his friendship with the president of the council, but the official replies that the president alone will not suffice.

In another attempt to obtain souls through an estate’s offices, Chichikov is told to put his request into a written statement and let it pass through a chain of administrative bodies, committees, an administrator, and a secretary. He objects that this procedure will take too long and tries to state his purpose plainly. The answer is to put even that formulation into the statement. Across these encounters, the plan meets not a single, simple barrier but a bureaucracy whose forms can delay, redirect, and disguise the transaction.

The registration in town nevertheless succeeds. Witnesses arrive, the indentures are signed, docketed, and registered, and Chichikov pays only half the usual government charges and publication fees because the council president orders the other half debited to another applicant. The official process does not simply verify the sale: personal influence and discretionary accounting help determine its cost. The apparent precision of signatures, documents, and fees gives the fictitious transaction an institutional finish.

Repeated Opportunity and the Plan’s Meaning

The same gap between recorded population and actual life recurs when Chichikov bargains with Khlobuev over an estate. Khlobuev reports that only fifty of the hundred souls listed at the last revision survive after cholera, and that some of the survivors have absconded. He says those fugitives must also be reckoned as dead, since pursuing them would cost so much that the property could pass to the legal authorities. The estate is offered for thirty-five thousand roubles, and Chichikov immediately haggles, proposing twenty-five thousand. Death, flight, tax liability, and the threatened loss of property converge in the bargaining itself.

The plan’s force lies in this conversion of a human and social reality into a sequence of entries, obligations, and claims. A dead peasant may remain taxable; a recorded peasant may be offered as collateral; a transfer that never occurs may acquire legal shape through deeds, witnesses, and official fees. Chichikov’s journey supplies the narrative with a succession of negotiations and administrative encounters, while the scheme reveals the economic logic that links estates, indebted owners, census records, and government offices. Its comedy depends on the fantasy of buying the dead; its critique depends on how readily the surrounding system already treats them as countable property.