Sihunling

“Dead souls” are deceased serfs whose names remain on the revision lists, allowing official records to count them as living even after their deaths. This discrepancy makes them at once a tax burden for landowners, a commodity in Paul Ivanovitch Chichikov’s dealings, and an unsettling human presence in the lists he collects. The phrase therefore joins the novel’s comic machinery of paperwork and bargaining to a more serious attention to lives reduced to names and entries.

Definition and Administrative Status

Under the rules Chichikov describes to Sobakevitch, peasants who have died remain on the census lists until new lists are rendered. The arrangement spares the courts the work of continual amendments, but leaves proprietors paying tax on people who are no longer alive. In the interval between a person’s death and the next revision, the state’s account and lived reality diverge: a dead serf continues to have a fiscal existence.

Chichikov approaches landowners by presenting that continuing tax liability as a burden he can relieve. He initially avoids calling the people he wants “dead,” preferring the guarded description “non-existent.” His language makes the transaction sound like an administrative accommodation, even as its object is the transfer of the names of the dead. Sobakevitch cuts through this circumlocution by asking directly whether Chichikov is after dead souls; he answers without surprise that they can be found.

The Scheme and Its Variations

Chichikov’s first stated request is for dead serfs whose names have not yet been removed from the revision list, which he asks their owner to transfer to him. His explanation to Sobakevitch presents the tax as an inconvenience to proprietors and the purchase as a way to relieve it. The transaction depends on the continued official registration of the deceased: the people are dead, but their names can still be treated as entries with transferable value.

The same scheme appears in a more elaborate guise when Chichikov speaks to General Alexander Dmitrievich Betrishev. He invents a decrepit uncle who supposedly owns three hundred serfs and two thousand roubles’ worth of other property, and claims the uncle will transfer his holdings only after the nephew has acquired as many souls as he has. Chichikov adds that the uncle has children with his housekeeper, so the supposed inheritance is in danger of passing to them. The narrative explicitly discloses that the story is false: Chichikov has no uncle at all. The invented family demand gives a convenient personal motive to a request that is really part of his acquisition scheme.

At Colonel Koshkarev’s estate offices, the administrative absurdity becomes more overt. Chichikov says he wants a few souls that are, so to speak, dead, and the Colonel tells him to put that description in a formal statement. Chichikov objects that his purpose requires the souls to be represented as alive. The exchange exposes the practical contradiction on which the scheme relies: the official procedure demands a written category, while the transaction only works if the dead are treated on paper as living.

In his proposal to Lienitsin, Chichikov makes the financial purpose explicit. He wants a mortgage but does not want anyone to incur the two-rouble payment on each living soul. He therefore proposes to acquire dead and absconded serfs who have not disappeared from the revision list, describing the arrangement as relief for impoverished landowners from the tax burden. A formal purchase agreement would present those souls as alive. The offer thus combines tax avoidance, a mortgageable appearance of property, secrecy, and a charitable rationale; Lienitsin, however, finds the arrangement curious and moves away from Chichikov.

Names, Lists, and Human Particularity

After his purchases, Chichikov prepares the deeds himself rather than entrusting them to a lawyer, copying the necessary documents from the papers in his dispatch-box. As he examines the names, the lists cease to seem interchangeable. The people represented there had ploughed, practiced crafts, carried things, and performed other work; some, the narrator notes, may have behaved well. The list turns a mass of acquired entries into a gathering of individuals whose lives have ended, though whose names remain in circulation.

The records also preserve different kinds of detail. The entries associated with Madame Korobotchka include nicknames and additions; Plushkin’s list is so terse that some entries consist of a Christian name, patronymic, and a couple of dots. Sobakevitch’s list, by contrast, is expansive and circumstantial: it records qualities such as skill in joinery, sobriety, and attentiveness to work, as well as the parents of each deceased person and how they had behaved. One entry identifies Thedotov’s father as unknown, names his mother as the maidservant Kapitolina, and describes his morals and honesty as good. Such particulars make the people seem to have lived only yesterday, complicating the notion that they are merely saleable units.

Chichikov responds to the papers with an unexpected softening of spirit. He addresses the dead collectively as friends and brothers and wonders how they lived and how they came to die. The scene does not undo his commercial purpose: he has just celebrated becoming owner of nearly four hundred souls. But the lists awaken a recognition that the paperwork’s objects were people with distinct histories, even as his scheme depends on their continued usefulness as entries.

Consequences and Significance

The dead souls’ official status gives Chichikov’s enterprise its opportunity and its danger. Because their names remain registered, he can arrange purchases and deeds as if living persons had changed owners; because the papers represent them as alive, the transactions can support his intended financial operations. The dispatch-box holds the deeds that embody this conversion of death into documentary property. When Chichikov is arrested, officials take the box with the indentures, and the loss of his papers becomes part of the immediate crisis that sends him into remorse in his cell.

The concept’s force lies in the contrast between administrative persistence and human absence. To the tax system, the deceased remain countable; to Chichikov, they can become assets; in the lists, they recover traces of labor, character, and kinship. The novel repeatedly shifts among these views, making the dead souls at once a practical instrument of fraud, a measure of the burden imposed on landowners, and a reminder of the individual lives hidden inside official enumeration.