Early political corruption of Qiqichou

Chichikov’s early bureaucratic corruption is a sustained practice of converting public office into private advantage, not a single act of bribery. He learns to make delay itself profitable: outwardly refusing rewards and promising swift service, he leaves petitioners’ business untouched until they are driven toward inflated payments to clerks. His later appointment to a commission overseeing a government building expands the same logic from individual transactions to public works. When a new director briefly uncovers deficits and seizes the officials’ houses, the corruption changes its methods rather than disappearing; Chichikov alone fails to recover his position and must begin again.

Entry into a Profitable Post

After gaining notice through charm, bearing, and diligence in business, Chichikov obtained promotion to what the narrator calls a “fat post.” An inquiry into bribery was already under way, but rather than treating scrutiny as a barrier, he turned it to account. His method depended on seeming to reject the very payments he intended to secure indirectly. When a petitioner reached for money while seeking recommendation letters and signatures, Chichikov stopped him, professed that public duty required no reward, and promised that the papers would be delivered to the petitioner’s home the following day. He took the petitioner’s address, creating an expectation of personal service while leaving the actual work undone.

The delay was calibrated. One day passed, then two, then three, with no documents arriving. When the petitioner returned, Chichikov apologized graciously, blamed the volume of business, and again promised that everything would be completed the next day. His politeness did not accompany progress: the case had not even been entered. Only after further inquiry did the petitioner hear that payments to copyists were required. The stated charge was one rouble per copyist, though each copyist would receive only a quarter-rouble and the balance would supposedly go to the Government. The petitioner, who had expected that the new anti-bribery regime would make official business cleaner, was instead made to pay more after waiting a week.

How Procedure Concealed Extortion

The scheme’s force lay in the distance between Chichikov’s performance and the office’s actual operations. He presented himself as an incorruptible official, reassured visitors, and took care to make the delay appear to arise from a crowded office rather than deliberate obstruction. The petitioner was not asked for a direct bribe by Chichikov; instead, frustration and uncertainty eventually made an unofficial fee seem necessary. The new scrutiny of illicit payments thus became part of the cover: the language of regular procedure and respectable fees obscured a process in which clerks continued to take money.

The narrator makes the institutional contradiction explicit. Once directors and other senior officials had become men of honour, secretaries and clerks should not have been able to continue their thefts with impunity. Yet the formal disappearance of bribe-taking did not eliminate the incentives or the channels through which it operated. Petitioners complained that they now had to pay a rouble per copyist, after waiting a week, when previously a bank-note to the director had sufficed to settle a matter promptly. The satire rests on this reversal: reform raises the official appearance of integrity while leaving citizens entangled in delay, opaque charges, and lower-level extraction.

Public Works and Private Prosperity

Chichikov’s opportunity widened when a commission was appointed to supervise construction of a government building and he became one of its most active members. The commission began work promptly, but for six years the public building struggled to rise beyond its basement. The narrator offers excuses about climate and materials, then sets the stalled government project against the visible success of the commissioners’ private construction: handsome houses of unofficial architecture appeared in other parts of town, and the commission members grew prosperous and established family lives.

The contrast turns a failed building into evidence of a functioning system of private enrichment. While the public undertaking remained unfinished, its administrators prospered. Chichikov, who had previously imposed strict self-denial on himself, also relaxed that austerity. He hired a good cook, wore fine linen and unusually patterned cloth, acquired two splendid horses, and adopted expensive grooming habits, including washing with eau-de-Cologne and using costly soap. These details register the material change in his circumstances: the commission’s years of stalled construction coincide with his first conspicuous indulgences.

Exposure, Adaptation, and Exclusion

The arrangement was disrupted by a new director, a military martinet hostile to bribe-takers and irregularities. On the day after his arrival he demanded accounts, discovered numerous deficits and missing sums, and turned his attention to the officials’ handsome houses. The response was sweeping: officials were retired in large numbers, and their houses were either taken over by the Government or converted into pious institutions and schools for soldiers’ children. Chichikov’s prosperity collapsed with the rest of the commission’s fabric.

Yet the crackdown did not end corruption. The director’s military outlook left him unfamiliar with the subtleties of civilian administration. Other officials maintained a discreet exterior and learned how to humour him, eventually restoring him to mildness. He believed he had selected proper men and prided himself on his judgment, while the new group around him proved more dishonest than its predecessors and escaped his suspicion. They turned the detection of irregularities into a profitable pursuit: the narrator compares them to fishermen hunting a fat sturgeon with a gaff, and says that each participant soon possessed several thousand roubles in capital. Even some former officials returned to service after adopting the appearance of rectitude.

Chichikov could not secure the same return. A secretary and principal intermediary tried to help him with money, but the director’s settled dislike of him proved decisive. The intermediary obtained only the tearing up of a dirty fragment of paper, and that by appealing to the supposed hardship that would befall Chichikov’s wife and children, who did not in fact exist. The episode completes the pattern of his early career: influence and money could bend administrative conduct, but they could not always overcome a superior’s fixed personal hostility.

A Career Begun Again

Chichikov concluded that lamenting his failure would accomplish nothing and resolved to act. He would begin his career anew, returning to patience and self-denial and moving to another town. For a time, however, his efforts brought only repeated exchanges from one low, wretched post to another, sometimes at the briefest notice. His losses did not erase his fastidious attachment to order and propriety: he continued to value neat office fittings and careful surroundings, avoided foul language, and changed his linen every other day, or daily in hot weather. The narrative therefore carries both the economic consequence of exposure and the persistence of his personal habits. His official advancement and the luxuries associated with it are gone; the appetite for respectable appearances remains, as does the capacity to start over.