The Fraudulent-will affair becomes the decisive legal scandal in the later narrative: an accusation of falsifying a will draws the Governor-General’s attention to the involvement of senior officials and to an inquiry deliberately clouded by false reports. Its significance lies not only in the alleged fraud itself, but in the way documentary manipulation and official entanglement threaten to make ordinary legal process useless.

The documentary world behind the affair

The scandal unfolds in a story where papers already have the power to convert people and transactions into official facts. Chichikov tells Manilov that the dead peasants are to be entered as living because that is how they appear in the census returns, and assures him that he will not step outside civil law. With Korobotchka, he argues that she can stop paying the tax on the dead serfs by transferring the dues to him. The contrast between a transaction’s practical purpose and its formally legible description establishes a recurring vulnerability: legality can be invoked as a matter of wording even when the underlying arrangement is deceptive.

The same vulnerability appears in the material handling of documents. When Korobotchka lacks paper for a plea to the land court, Chichikov gives her a sheet of stamped paper, explaining that it is intended for serf indentures rather than legal petitions. He then has her dictate her peasants’ names because she has no written list. Later, while preparing his own deeds, he studies the names of the dead as if the lists gave each person a distinct character: Korobotchka’s entries carry nicknames, Plushkin’s are compressed, and Sobakevitch’s are unusually detailed. The episode shows how registers and deeds confer administrative presence on people who have died, while the later fraudulent-will affair turns the reliability of such paperwork into a question of public justice.

The accusation and the Governor-General’s response

The Governor-General confronts Murazov angrily, condemning Chichikov and insisting that he had been involved in business beneath even the lowest thief. He identifies the charge specifically as the fraudulent-will matter and says that Chichikov deserved public flogging. Murazov does not claim that Chichikov is innocent; instead, he questions whether the case has been proved, noting that sufficient evidence is still lacking. The dispute is therefore not a simple opposition between an accusation and an exoneration: it concerns the difference between moral condemnation and what the evidence can establish.

The Governor-General says that a woman who impersonated the deceased is the chief witness and orders her brought in for questioning. The alleged impersonation offers a concrete human witness to the fraud, but the inquiry is already compromised by the participation of powerful people. The Governor-General acknowledges that leading officials, including the local Governor, have become implicated. He is particularly angered that Murazov has defended and gone bail for Chichikov despite the gravity of the suspected offenses.

Murazov answers that the local Governor is one of the heirs under the will and therefore has a right to intervene. He also describes the wider context: after a wealthy woman dies without a precise, regular disposition of her property, fortune hunters gather around the inheritance. His explanation does not erase the possibility of fraud. Rather, it places the case amid competing claims to an estate, official interests, and the ordinary opportunism that follows a poorly settled inheritance.

Reports, obstruction, and institutional disorder

The affair’s investigation is further destabilized by the lawyer’s maneuvers on Chichikov’s behalf. He circulates warnings among the local Governor, the Chief of Gendarmery, and confidential officials, each suggesting that another is preparing a damaging report. The officials become anxious and turn to Samosvitov for advice. Reports then multiply, mixing the matter of the dead souls with scandalous allegations about officials’ private lives. The result is not a clearer account of the case but a mass of competing insinuations that makes it difficult to distinguish relevant evidence from invented distraction.

This paper campaign accompanies Samosvitov’s physical scheme to free a detained woman: disguised as a gendarme, he arranges for another woman to be substituted for the prisoner. The two operations expose different forms of interference with official procedure. One manipulates the custody of a person; the other floods the administrative record with false claims. Together they show how the investigation can be attacked both in practice and in the files meant to describe it.

When the resulting dossier reaches the Governor-General, it overwhelms even his capable secretary, who nearly loses his reason trying to extract a coherent account. The disorder is consequential because the province is already facing urgent problems: famine has appeared in one district, food distribution has been badly handled, and Old Believers elsewhere are agitated by a rumor that an Antichrist is purchasing the dead. The fraudulent-will scandal thus enters an administration burdened by failures beyond the inheritance case, while fabricated allegations make it harder to determine where responsibility lies.

The threatened turn from civil process

In his address to the officials, the Governor-General says that the scandal has brought other dishonorable matters to light and that people he had believed honorable are involved. He claims to know both the purpose of those who have made the case nearly impossible to resolve and the identity of the ringleader, despite that person’s attempts to conceal his part. His account casts the confusion not merely as an accidental accumulation of gossip but as an effort to obstruct judgment.

The proposed response marks a sharp escalation. The Governor-General says he intends to pursue a summary court-martial rather than ordinary documentary procedure, and hopes to obtain the Emperor’s authority. He argues that civil means have been exhausted: some necessary documents have been burned, excessive false and extraneous evidence has been introduced, and fictitious reports have further obscured the inquiry. The scandal’s unresolved evidentiary problem therefore becomes an institutional crisis. The official who condemns fraud proposes an exceptional tribunal because, in his view, the civil record has been so damaged that it can no longer deliver a reliable decision.