Revision lists

Revision lists are periodic census records of serfs, yet in Dead Souls their decisive power lies in the gap between the people they once counted and the names that remain after those people have died. Under a system in which landowners continued to pay tax on registered serfs until a new census, the lists gave the dead an active fiscal and legal existence: they could burden an owner, pass through a sale, and be made to support a fraudulent claim to wealth. The document is at once a record, a liability, and the instrument on which Chichikov builds his scheme.

Definition and Administrative Force

A revision list records the serfs counted at a periodic census. The interval between revisions meant that a person who died after one census could remain officially registered until the next. The owner was still charged tax for that name, although the person no longer lived or worked on the estate. What might appear to be a clerical lag therefore had direct material consequences: the state’s record continued to impose a cost on the landowner, while the deceased remained legible to the administration as a taxable “soul.”

The same discrepancy could also be turned toward credit. As the novel’s account of the system explains, owners could borrow against dead as well as living serfs. Chichikov’s plan exploits both sides of this arrangement: he offers to relieve landowners of the continuing tax burden by purchasing the names, then hopes to use the acquired list as collateral for a substantial loan. The scheme depends not on reviving the dead, but on the state’s delayed correction of its records and on the financial value those records retain in the meantime.

From Census Entry to Saleable Name

Chichikov approaches landowners by presenting the transaction as a practical release from taxation. With Manilov, the conversation turns explicitly to price, but Manilov offers the registered souls without payment and says he will bear the expenses of the sale. Chichikov’s almost uncontrollable delight gives the document’s abstract financial promise a bodily expression: the apparent generosity of the transaction brings him close to leaping from his chair.

At another estate, Chichikov asks for dead serfs whose names have not yet been removed from the revision list and requests that they be transferred to him. The procedure makes the distinction between a person and an entry central to the bargain. When negotiating with Sobakevitch, Chichikov calls the dead peasants “non-existent,” carefully avoiding the word “dead” as he frames their transfer as relief from an unfair tax. Sobakevitch, by contrast, insists on the price of the names. Their negotiation shows how the list can be treated simultaneously as the residue of human lives and as a commodity whose value is disputed between buyer and seller.

The sellers’ records give those nominal assets markedly different forms. One list must be dictated because its owner knows the peasants’ names by heart and has never compiled a written copy; another is praised for its order and detail. Sobakevitch’s list specifies each serf’s trade, age, and pedigree, adds remarks about conduct and sobriety, and records parents as well as individual abilities. A dead person is thus presented not merely as a taxable unit but through a miniature account of work, habits, and family. Chichikov’s purchases convert these distinct lives into transferable entries, but the details preserve traces of the people the transaction treats as absent.

Paperwork, Registration, and Circumvention

The scheme requires more than private agreement: the purchases must be registered. Chichikov arrives at the municipal office seeking the desk that handles serf indentures and tells the officials that he has bought peasants for transfer from several landowners. He has the purchase list and some vendors present, while powers of attorney cover the others. When he asks to complete the matter that day, Ivan Antonovitch tells him that additional proof is needed to show that no impediments exist. Chichikov invokes his friendship with the Council president, but the clerk indicates that one connection alone will not suffice.

The exchange exposes the difference between a transaction’s paper form and the administrative process that makes it effective. Chichikov presents the purchases as transfers and supplies documents, yet registration remains subject to procedural requirements and official discretion. In a separate scene, he seeks to make a plea through the offices of Colonel Koshkarev. The Colonel describes a chain in which the Office for the Reception of Reports and Returns considers the statement, sends it to him, passes it to the Estate Works Committee for revision, and then forwards it to the Administrator and Secretary. Chichikov interrupts to explain orally that he wants a few souls who are, so to speak, dead; the Colonel directs him to put that very formulation in writing. The elaborate route of the application and the bluntness of its subject collide, making bureaucracy’s circulation of documents part of the novel’s comedy as well as a practical obstacle.

Once Chichikov’s indentures are signed, docketed, and registered, however, the administrative machinery can also be made to favor him. The President orders that he pay only half the usual government charges and publication fees, with the other half somehow debited to another applicant’s account. The completed registration gives the purchased names official standing while the shifted fee shows how personal intervention can modify the apparently regular process. The lists’ force therefore rests not only on formal rules but on the clerks, witnesses, signatures, charges, and favors through which those rules operate.

A Scheme Born from the Tax System

Chichikov’s idea originates in an earlier legal assignment involving a ruined estate. As an attorney handling the transfer of several hundred peasants to the Public Trustee, he must explain that half are dead while arranging the estate’s affairs. A secretary asks whether the deceased are still entered on the revision lists, then treats their replacement by births over time as a reason not to hesitate. Chichikov recognizes the opportunity: if dead serfs remain registered until a new revision, he can buy them before the records change and seek payment from the Council of Public Trust, which might pay two hundred roubles per name. He calculates that the plan could yield a capital of two hundred thousand roubles.

His projected transaction depends on presenting the names as if they were being transferred to land. Chichikov reasons that he can claim to be moving the serfs to the provinces of Taurida and Kherson, where land is cheap on condition that it be colonized. He imagines using a fabricated superintendent’s confirmation and even considers naming the supposed settlement after himself. In this design, revision-list status supplies the raw material, the transfer story supplies a lawful-looking explanation, and the anticipated loan turns administrative survival into private capital. The fraud reveals how a census category can be detached from the human beings it once described and made to serve a speculative financial plan.

The same logic remains visible in the later purchase of an estate from Khlobuev. Khlobuev says that only fifty of the hundred souls listed at the last revision survive the ravages of cholera; some of the survivors have also absconded, and he says they must be counted as dead because legal proceedings against them could leave the estate in the authorities’ hands. He asks thirty-five thousand roubles for the property, and Chichikov immediately begins bargaining. Here the list is not an ingenious abstraction alone: it sits inside an estate’s real deterioration, disease, flight, and financial exposure. Its count determines how the living and missing are represented in the sale, even as the people themselves remain beyond the neatness of the record.

Names and the Human Remainder

After his purchases, Chichikov prepares the deeds himself rather than entrusting them to a lawyer, working from papers kept in his dispatch-box. As he reviews the lists, he finds that each bears the imprint of the owner who supplied it. Korobotchka’s entries carry nicknames and additions; Plushkin’s are so concise that some are reduced to a Christian name, a patronymic, and a couple of dots; Sobakevitch’s are expansive, recording skills, sobriety, work habits, and family origins. The formats vary, but every list places the dead into a documentary order that can be copied, compared, and transferred.

Yet the details unsettle the clean arithmetic of Chichikov’s plan. Reading the names, he imagines the peasants at work—ploughing, practising trades, carrying things, and drinking—and wonders how they lived and how they came to die. Sobakevitch’s descriptions make the names seem especially fresh, as if the people had lived only yesterday. For a moment the paper does more than certify an asset: it prompts Chichikov to address the dead as companions whose lives exceeded their entries. The moment does not undo the transaction, but it reveals its central contradiction. Revision lists make the dead usable to owners and officials precisely because they preserve names in place of lives; the novel’s attention to those names briefly restores the human particularity the tax system has reduced to a count.