Khlobuev’s church alms-collecting mission is Murazov’s practical answer to a life Khlobuev himself regards as ruined: a commission intended to turn idleness into service, provide for his family, and renew his sense of purpose. The proposed work is religious in its object but civic and personal in its reach. Carrying a ledger from landowner to peasant and townsman, Khlobuev is to seek money for a church, learn who needs help, and earn trust through the character of his service rather than the authority of an official post.

Background: Poverty and idleness

Murazov has brought Khlobuev to his rooms and asks plainly how his affairs stand. Khlobuev explains that his aunt’s legacy—fifty serfs and thirty thousand roubles—has gone to satisfy debts, leaving him destitute again. He says that at least a hundred thousand roubles would be needed to escape his difficulties. If he had the money, he would rent a tenement and educate his children; he considers his own career over, his health broken, and himself fit for nothing else.

Murazov contests the premise that Khlobuev can simply withdraw from useful work. Khlobuev points to his ill health and dyspepsia, but Murazov insists that even the humblest task gives a person a proper function and that idleness leaves room for temptation. Nor, he argues, can Khlobuev’s children be educated by a father whose own example has been shaped by idleness and card-playing. His rebuke is not an abstract call to respectability: it challenges Khlobuev’s proposed solution of devoting himself to his children while continuing to avoid labor himself.

A commission found through the Church

When Khlobuev imagines that a monastery might receive him, Murazov rejects it as another refuge from responsibility. He explains that he sought counsel from a recluse who would not show his face and who broke silence only to speak of the need to build a church and collect money for it. Murazov then went to the Archimandrite, who was looking for a trustworthy collector from among the nobility or educated merchants—someone who would guard the alms as carefully as his own salvation.

Murazov sees Khlobuev as suited to this difficult assignment precisely because it would make him travel and attend to other people’s circumstances. With a ledger, he would go from landowner to peasant and from peasant to townsman, discovering where people lived and who needed assistance. The journey could also make him useful beyond the immediate fundraising: Murazov says that the Governor-General needs a secretary who knows his work not only from books but through experience, and that such experience might eventually qualify Khlobuev for that role. The mission therefore offers a possible route back into public usefulness without requiring him to return at once to the Civil Service.

Practical support and moral purpose

Khlobuev doubts that he has the energy for the work and worries about leaving his wife and children without provision. Murazov answers both objections with concrete commitments. He will take the family under his care, procure a tutor for the children, provide a tilt-waggon to ease the journey, and give Khlobuev money that he can distribute to those more needy than himself. The arrangement is not merely a job title: it supplies the means to travel and places responsibility for discerning need at the center of the work.

Murazov also distinguishes this form of asking from Khlobuev’s present dependence. Traveling with a wallet to solicit alms for the Church, he says, is nobler than remaining where he is and asking help for himself alone. As a petitioner on behalf of the Church, Khlobuev would be approached differently from a government official feared for his position; people could speak to him without the same sense of peril. The assignment thus depends on trust and encounter, not simply on collecting funds.

Acceptance and significance

Murazov frames the work as religious practice made tangible. Honest toil, he tells Khlobuev, has merit in the eyes of the All-Merciful equal to prayer; even cleaning a floor should be done as if for God. Work would occupy the time otherwise given to card-playing, feasting, and the pleasures of the fashionable world. He rejects Khlobuev’s fear that the task exceeds his strength by arguing that human tasks exceed strength unless supported by prayer. Khlobuev is to accept the commission as sent by God, obtain the Archimandrite’s account book and blessing, and set out.

Khlobuev finally submits to Murazov and accepts the commission as a divine trust. As he does so, renewed vigor and confidence rise in him, and he begins to hope that he may overcome his troubles. The change is real but presented as an awakening of hope, not as proof that his financial or personal difficulties have already been resolved. The episode makes labor the hinge between religious counsel and reform: charity gives Khlobuev an obligation beyond himself, while the journey offers a way to become useful through sustained contact with the people he is charged to serve.