Fabricate reports to disrupt the investigation into Kabukicho

Samosvitov’s fabricated reports are a counterattack on the inquiry into Chichikov: by making officials fear that accusations are being prepared against them, they turn the investigation into a flood of mutually entangling allegations. The scheme does not establish Chichikov’s innocence; it makes the records meant to clarify his case so confused that even the Governor-General’s capable secretary struggles to summarize them.

The inquiry and its vulnerabilities

The report plot unfolds against an investigation already crowded with documents, testimony, and rumor. Chichikov’s purchase list must be registered through the local office, with vendors or their powers of attorney accounted for and witnesses summoned. The transactions depend on a sharp distinction between legal form and underlying deception: Chichikov says the deceased peasants should be recorded as living because that is how they appear in the census returns, and he presents the transfer as an orderly assumption of dues. His dealings with landowners likewise leave paper trails that can later be examined.

The officials’ earlier efforts to discover who Chichikov is expose how little reliable information they possess. They question landowners, seek information through servants, and convene to debate whether he should be detained or might himself have grounds to detain them. The reports exploit this uncertainty and the officials’ mutual vulnerability: rather than answer the evidence against Chichikov directly, the scheme makes the investigators wonder what damaging information may be circulating about themselves.

How the reports are manufactured

The lawyer sets the chain of alarm in motion by arranging for the local Governor to hear that the Public Prosecutor is preparing a report against him. The Chief of Gendarmery is then led to believe that a confidential official is compiling a similar report against him. That official, in turn, is told that someone even more confidential is preparing a case against him. Each warning redirects suspicion toward another official, and the three are left anxious enough to turn to Samosvitov for advice.

From this manufactured distrust comes a torrent of documents. One report follows another, each adding alleged misconduct to the accumulation. The contents range from claims that an official has an illegitimate son, to allegations of a paid mistress or a gadabout wife. These personal scandals are welded to Chichikov’s past and to the dead-soul affair, until fact, insinuation, and fabricated romance become difficult to disentangle.

The dossier and its consequences

When the dossier reaches the Governor-General, it leaves him flabbergasted. His unusually capable and energetic secretary nearly loses his reason trying to find a coherent thread in the mass of accusations. The reports therefore work not by proving a single counterclaim, but by multiplying competing claims until the official record itself becomes a source of confusion.

The timing compounds the effect. The Governor-General already faces famine in one part of the province, where officials have distributed food badly; unrest among Old Believers stirred by a report that an Antichrist is buying the dead; and a peasant uprising elsewhere, fueled by rumors that peasants will become landowners and landowners will be reduced to the peasant condition. Against these urgent crises, the dossier adds another knot of allegations for the authorities to unravel. The episode makes documentary procedure an instrument of power as well as administration: records can expose wrongdoing, but fabricated records and fear can also obstruct judgment when officials are already entangled in one another’s interests.