Registration of Chichikov’s serf purchases

The registration of Chichikov’s serf purchases is the point at which his speculative plan acquires an official documentary form. He brings the deeds to the municipal offices to transfer peasants bought from several landowners, including the dead serfs at the center of his scheme. The transaction depends not on the peasants’ living presence but on their continued appearance in the records, and its progress reveals how formal procedure, personal influence, and official discretion work together to make paper claims actionable.

Background and purpose

The scheme rests on the census and tax system of serfdom. Between revisions of the rolls, an owner remained liable for the poll tax on people still listed as serfs, even if they had died. Because registered serfs could also serve as collateral, Chichikov sees a way to purchase dead peasants cheaply, relieve their former owners of the tax burden, and assemble a fictitious population that he hopes to mortgage for a fortune. He intends to present the purchase as a transfer to land in Kherson, where he claims he will settle them.

The plan has already been conceived as a legal-looking operation rather than an openly criminal one. In his earlier work as an attorney, Chichikov learned that dead peasants who remained on the revision lists could still be counted in financial calculations. He reasoned that owners burdened by taxes might willingly surrender such names and that, before a new revision, he could turn them into valuable assets. The registration scene puts that calculation to a test: a private bargain must now pass through forms, official scrutiny, witnesses, and fees.

Arrival at the municipal offices

On the day he means to complete the transfer, Chichikov changes from his informal Scottish costume into more European dress, tightens his waistcoat, applies eau-de-Cologne, gathers his papers, and sets out for the municipal offices. He is eager to finish, not because he fears missing an appointment—the Council’s President is an intimate acquaintance—but because the affair has been anxious and difficult and he wants the burden of his supposedly unsubstantial souls off his shoulders as soon as possible.

The public exterior of the offices gives little indication of the disorder inside. Chichikov and Manilov encounter one another in the street and exchange an extravagant embrace before entering together. Inside, the corridors and rooms are dirty, in contrast to the building’s cleaner exterior. Chichikov approaches a desk and asks where business relating to serf indentures is conducted; when questioned about his purpose, he says he wishes to make an application. The transfer of property thus begins in an ordinary, shabby administrative setting, among clerks and desks rather than in any dramatic tribunal.

The application and its obstacles

Chichikov presents the substance of his request: he has purchased peasants from several landowners in the district and wants the purchase list registered. Some vendors are present; for the others, he has powers of attorney. He asks whether the matter can be completed that day, explaining that he wants to hasten it. Ivan Antonovitch replies that it cannot proceed without further proof that no impediments exist. Chichikov answers by invoking his close friendship with the Council’s President, but the clerk says that the President alone will not suffice; the customary involvement of others is also required.

This exchange makes the transaction’s practical rules visible. A purchase list and application do not, by themselves, produce registration. The clerk can delay the matter by demanding further proof, while Chichikov tries to accelerate it by naming a powerful acquaintance. Neither the impersonal paperwork nor personal access works alone: the transaction advances through their combination. The procedure is bureaucratic, but it is also elastic, shaped by relationships and the judgment of those who administer it.

Deeds, witnesses, and discretionary costs

The President receives a letter from Plushkin and agrees to act as his attorney. Chichikov asks for the deeds to be registered immediately, explaining that he wants to leave town the following day and has brought both the indenture forms and his application. The President promises to have the indentures completed that day but also tells him that he must remain in town, postponing the departure he had planned.

The deeds then pass to Ivan Antonovitch for processing. Sobakevitch intervenes to insist on witnesses—at least two for each party—and recommends summoning the Public Prosecutor and the Inspector of the Medical Department, whom he depicts as men with little useful work to do. The President accepts the suggestion and sends for them. The transaction acquires the outward supports of a public legal act: named officials and other witnesses arrive, and each signs with a list of his titles and qualifications. The abundance and variety of those signatures lend the documents an elaborate official appearance, though the narrative’s account of the witnesses also makes the procedure seem routine and faintly absurd.

After the indentures have been signed, docketed, and registered, Chichikov is charged only a small amount in government percentage and publication fees. The President has ordered that he pay only half the usual charges; the other half is somehow placed on the account of another applicant for serf registration. The reduction is not presented as a neutral rule but as a benefit granted through the President’s intervention. An official process that appears to measure and record property therefore also redistributes its costs through discretionary favor.

The fiction behind the registered transfer

Once the paperwork is ready, the President asks Chichikov why he has purchased peasants apart from land and whether he intends to transfer them elsewhere. Chichikov says that he does. Asked to which province, he names Kherson. The explanation matches the cover story he designed: he claims to be moving the purchased people to a place where he will settle them, while the intended value of the transaction lies in the fact that many of them are dead.

The registration does not establish that the peasants are alive or that Chichikov has a real settlement waiting for them. It establishes that the sale has been processed in the forms recognized by the offices. The separation between human reality and documentary status is the transaction’s essential contradiction: the dead can be bought, transferred, and entered into a new owner’s plans because the rolls continue to treat them as taxable and transferable souls. By accepting the deeds and recording them, the officials help turn an implausible scheme into an administratively legible one.

The episode’s force lies in this conversion of fiction into procedure. Chichikov’s scheme is built on a gap between death and the next revision of the rolls; the offices do not close that gap so much as organize it. Applications, powers of attorney, witnesses, signatures, and fees supply the formality that the scheme requires, while friendship with the President eases its passage. The completed registration is therefore both a practical step in Chichikov’s plan and a satire of a system in which a person’s recorded status can outlast life and still circulate as property.