Gorky

Nizhni Novgorod appears as a point of origin in the novel’s account of trade and provincial display. Its specific mention connects a wholesale market in manorial goods to a local fair, situating the town within the movement of produce and money that surrounds the story’s dealings in estates and serfs.

Trade and the Provincial Fair

The town is identified as the place where wholesale dealers bought manorial produce before transferring it to a later fair held for the nobility. The fair therefore represents a second stage of circulation: goods acquired in bulk at Nizhni Novgorod are brought into the province for sale. The passage distinguishes this event from an earlier fair for horses, cattle, cheese, and other peasant produce, whose buyers were cattle dealers and middlemen.

Place in the Novel’s Economic World

The reference is brief, but its context sets the fair amid bad roads, a poor harvest, and officials and landowners pursuing luxury and expensive entertainments. Nizhni Novgorod itself is not described; its narrative function is to mark the commercial route by which estate goods reach provincial buyers. That route belongs to a broader economy in which land and registered serfs carry financial value: the census system makes owners liable for taxes on people still listed after death, while Chichikov’s scheme exploits the possibility of acquiring such registrations and using them to seek credit. The town’s mention thus anchors one strand of the novel’s satire in the concrete movement of goods between regional markets and provincial society.