Prohibition on buying or mortgaging landless peasants

The Prohibition on buying or mortgaging landless peasants is the legal obstacle at the center of Paul Ivanovitch Chichikov’s scheme: it forbids the purchase or mortgage of peasants without land, even as the census and credit system make deceased serfs financially useful. Chichikov’s answer is not to abandon the plan but to disguise its substance with the language of transfer, formal registration, and a supposed settlement in Kherson.

Legal and Economic Setting

Under the serf system described in the novel, a landowner remained liable for taxes on serfs recorded in the most recent revision list, even if they had since died. At the same time, registered “dead souls” could serve as security for borrowing. Chichikov intends to acquire those names cheaply, claim that he will resettle the people, and use the resulting list to raise money for an estate and living serfs. The prohibition on landless transactions makes the gap between the legal fiction and the actual absence of both land and living people decisive to the fraud.

Chichikov’s Evasion

The idea takes shape when Chichikov, working as an attorney on a ruined estate, hears officials treat deaths between censuses as administratively manageable: one deceased person, the secretary observes, will eventually be replaced by a newborn. Chichikov recognizes that the interval before a new revision list could let him buy dead serfs and seek public credit for them. He reasons that the law bars buying or mortgaging peasants without land, but plans to claim that he is acquiring them for transfer to Kherson, where land is supposedly available cheaply on condition that it be colonized. He even imagines producing confirmation from the Kherson rural police superintendent, a post he proposes to hold himself, and naming the fictitious settlement after himself.

Documents and the Appearance of Legality

The scheme depends on making paper records do the work of land and living population. Chichikov tells Manilov that the purchased peasants should be written down as living because that is how they appear in census returns, and invokes his respect for civil law to reassure his seller. At the registration office, he presents purchase lists from several landowners and asks for their transfer to be recorded, supplying some vendors in person and powers of attorney for others. The neat list prepared by Sobakevitch records each serf’s trade, age, and pedigree, with marginal notes on conduct and sobriety: details that give the dead names the texture of individual, administratively credible lives.

Sellers, Costs, and Contradictions

The transactions reveal how the fiction relies on real burdens and uneven bargaining. Chichikov tells Korobotchka that taking over the dead peasants’ dues will spare her further tax payments and the need to placate an assessor; she sees the advantage but fears that an unfamiliar nighttime purchaser may be cheating her. With Sobakevitch, the bargaining turns on price and the purchase deed, while Chichikov resists paying earnest money before they go to town. Later, Khlobuev explains that of the hundred souls recorded at the last revision only fifty remain after cholera, and that some survivors have absconded; he counts those fugitives as dead for purposes of the estate’s liabilities and asks thirty-five thousand roubles. Such episodes show the administrative category stretching across different circumstances—death, flight, continuing tax obligation, and the sale of an estate—without making the people themselves interchangeable in lived reality.

The Rule’s Function in the Plot

The prohibition is not presented as a barrier that reliably stops exploitation. Instead, the novel shows how formal procedure can become the instrument by which an unlawful fiction is given a plausible public shape. Chichikov’s project turns the state’s own records, census interval, tax rules, and transfer process into resources for speculation; its credibility depends on officials and sellers accepting documentary form where the underlying land and population are absent. The rule therefore exposes the distance between legality as paperwork and legality as a truthful account of human lives.