Deceased serfs registered as living

Deceased serfs registered as living are the human residue of a census system and the exploitable basis of Chichikov’s scheme. Their names remain on official rolls after death, so their owners continue to owe tax on them; in a system that also permits borrowing against registered “souls,” the gap between a living person and a recorded one becomes a financial opportunity. The fiction is not that these people once existed, but that the state’s paperwork continues to count them as present.

Census, Tax, and Collateral

Under serfdom, a man’s standing could be judged by the number of “souls” he possessed. The census was periodic rather than continuous, perhaps once in ten or twenty years, and the last census remained the operative record in the interval. An owner was therefore taxed for every person listed there, even if some had since died. The dead remained a fiscal liability because the record outlasted the life it described.

The same lag in official knowledge made the record useful as collateral. An owner could borrow against “dead souls” just as against living ones. Chichikov’s plan was to buy the deceased at reduced prices, giving landowners relief from the continuing tax while acquiring a list of fictitious serfs that could support a bank loan. He imagined using the proceeds to buy an estate and living serfs, converting names retained by the census into the beginning of a fortune. The transaction transfers costs and benefits unevenly: sellers shed tax obligations, while Chichikov seeks to capture the credit value of the records.

The Proposal to Manilov

When Chichikov first explains the purchase to Manilov, he initially says that he wants to buy peasants, then specifies that he wants the dead ones. His clarification is exact: these are peasants recorded as alive in the last census, although they have since died. Manilov drops his pipe and stares at him, unable to tell whether the proposal is a joke or evidence that his guest has lost his wits. Chichikov’s grave expression gives him no such escape.

The legal fiction becomes explicit when Chichikov proposes completing the purchase. He insists that the names should be written down as living because that is how they appear in the census returns, and presents his respect for civil law as a guarantee. The contradiction is the scheme’s operating principle: the men are dead in fact, but living in the record. Once Manilov is reassured that the arrangement can be represented as lawful, he offers the souls unconditionally and agrees to bear the expenses of the sale. Chichikov’s satisfaction registers the value of an acquisition obtained without a purchase price.

A Bargain with the Tax Burden

With another landowner, Chichikov makes the seller’s continuing liability the heart of his pitch. The dead souls still generate tax, he argues, and transferring them would relieve the owner of both the payment and the trouble. He offers fifteen roubles per soul. The landowner’s hesitation—she has never sold dead souls—shows how unusual the transaction sounds, even as Chichikov recasts it as a practical exchange: the seller gives up names that bring no living labor and keeps paying for them, while he takes over the names and their potential use.

That calculation is not merely abstract. When Khlobuev offers his estate, he says that of the hundred souls entered at the last revision only fifty survive, after cholera ravaged the population. Some of those survivors have absconded; he says they too must be reckoned as dead, since pursuing them in court could leave the property passing wholesale to the legal authorities. He asks thirty-five thousand roubles for the estate, and Chichikov immediately bargains it down, proposing twenty-five thousand. The exchange places census figures, disease, flight, legal costs, and a distressed property in the same negotiation: the gap between registered population and surviving labor is part of the estate’s price.

Names Made Transferable

The fiction has an origin in Chichikov’s earlier work as an attorney handling the affairs of a ruined estate. Its peasants had suffered losses from cattle disease, failed harvests, epidemics, and mismanagement. While arranging for them to be placed in the care of the Public Trustee, he had to explain that half were dead, though they still appeared on the revision lists. A secretary’s casual response—that one person’s death would eventually be offset by another’s birth—prompted Chichikov to recognize that the register, not the actual population, could determine the immediate financial calculation.

He reasoned that the Public Trust might pay two hundred roubles for each purchased soul and imagined a capital of two hundred thousand. He also recognized a legal obstacle: peasants could not be bought or mortgaged without land. His proposed evasion was to claim that he was acquiring them for transfer to Taurida or Kherson, where land could be obtained cheaply on the promise of settlement, and to supply the confirmation himself as superintendent of the supposed rural police. The plan thus depends not only on dead people remaining countable, but on a further chain of claims that would make their transfer appear administratively credible.

Registration and Its Contradictions

In N, Chichikov presents his purchases as a formal transfer from various landowners and asks that the purchase list be registered. The official Ivan Antonovitch tells him the transaction cannot be completed that day: further proof is required that no impediments exist. Chichikov invokes his intimacy with the President of the Council, but the official replies that one connection is not enough. The episode shows the register being produced through a process of application, proof, and official discretion, not through a simple change of names.

The registration eventually proceeds with witnesses summoned at Sobakevitch’s suggestion, including the Public Prosecutor, the Inspector of the Medical Department, and other officials. After the indentures are signed, docketed, and registered, Chichikov pays only half the usual government percentage and publication fees; the President has arranged for the rest to be charged to another applicant. The transaction’s official completion therefore rests on both documents and patronage. It also makes the scheme visible to the same civic network whose procedures have legitimized the transfer.

The absurdity becomes sharper at the Colonel’s estate offices. When Chichikov tries to obtain souls through a Statement of Plea, he objects that the proposed journey through multiple offices and committees will consume too much time, and explains that the souls he wants are “so to speak, dead.” The Colonel instructs him to put exactly that phrase in writing. Bureaucratic procedure does not resolve the contradiction; it can reproduce it in a form to be routed, reviewed, and returned.

Exposure and Significance

The purchased souls do not remain a private financial fiction. At the moment the town’s rumors spread, the Public Prosecutor is told both about the purchase of dead souls and about an alleged scheme to abduct the Governor’s daughter. The two claims generate separate lines of public speculation. The dead-soul transaction, once made credible through deeds and registration, becomes an object of gossip and official alarm; the paperwork that enabled Chichikov to pass as a lawful buyer cannot prevent the same transaction from being retold as evidence against him.

The status of these serfs condenses the book’s critique of an economy in which recorded population can be taxed, sold, pledged, and transferred after the people themselves have died or fled. The record relieves one landowner of a recurring cost and offers Chichikov a route to credit, while the actual history behind the numbers includes epidemic death, ruined estates, and absent laborers. The scheme’s comic premise depends on treating the paperwork as both real enough to command money and false enough to conceal the human absence it records.