The governor convened officials and delivered a speech on purging corruption

The Governor-General’s address to the officials is the unfinished closing scene of Dead Souls. Convened on the eve of the Prince’s departure for St. Petersburg, the meeting moves from threatened punishment for a tangled official scandal to an appeal for collective moral responsibility. Its decisive tension lies between the Prince’s promise of exceptional legal action and his recognition that no tribunal or penalty can by itself uproot the corrupt practices that sustain the administration.

The Meeting and Its Immediate Stakes

An hour after Chichikov leaves town, the Governor-General summons officials of every rank to a private meeting at his residence. The invitation says he is about to depart for St. Petersburg and wishes to explain his reasons. The assembled officials wait with apprehension and self-examination; when the Prince enters, they bow, and he acknowledges them with a slight inclination of his head. His composed manner gives the meeting the formality of an official audience, while the silence and unease of those present make clear that they expect the address to concern their own conduct.

The Prince identifies a scandal in their midst that has exposed further dishonourable matters. He says he knows the purpose of those who have made the case nearly impossible to resolve by ordinary means, and knows the identity of the ringleader despite efforts to conceal that person’s involvement. The address thus presents the scandal not as an isolated irregularity but as a chain of connected misconduct whose complications have become part of the crisis.

Proposed Investigation and Punishment

The Governor-General says he intends to pursue the affair not through ordinary documentary procedure but through a court-martial, for which he hopes to obtain the Emperor’s authorization after laying the circumstances before him. His stated grounds are procedural as well as moral: some necessary documents have been burned, false and extraneous evidence has been introduced in excess, and fictitious reports have further obscured the inquiry. In his view, the deliberate obstruction of civil investigation makes a military tribunal the only available means of resolving the case.

He pauses to solicit the officials’ opinion, but no one answers. Every man has his eyes lowered, and many have turned pale. The silence becomes part of the scene’s evidence: the Prince’s proposal receives no public challenge, while the audience’s visible anxiety suggests that his knowledge reaches beyond the announced charges. He then alludes to another matter known, he says, only to those who carried it out. He will not set its particulars down in documents; instead, he proposes to act as plaintiff and petitioner and rely on eyewitness evidence. An official starts, and the movement spreads alarm among the more apprehensive listeners.

The Prince declares that the principal conspirators should lose rank and property and that the rest should be dismissed. He acknowledges that such a course would punish some innocent people along with the guilty, but says the disgrace of the affair leaves no other course open if justice is to be done. He also recognizes the limits and costs of the measures: dismissed officials may be replaced by others who repeat their misconduct, and men previously regarded as honourable may lose their reputations. Even so, he presents severity as a duty rather than a personal impulse, accepting that he may be accused of excessive harshness and describing himself as an instrument of the retribution justice demands.

From Retribution to an Appeal for Mercy

After laying out the threatened penalties, the Prince reverses the direction of his speech. He says that the man holding so many people’s fate in his hands now makes a request of them; if they grant it, the matter will be forgotten and pardoned, and he will intercede for them with the Throne. The conditional offer does not erase the investigation he has announced. Instead, it places the possibility of pardon beside the prospect of punishment and makes a change in the officials’ conduct the address’s central demand.

The Prince argues that dishonesty cannot be entirely eliminated by preventive measures or penalties because its roots run deep. Bribery, he says, has become necessary to some officials and even serves as their mainstay; many find it impossible to swim against the current. He therefore appeals to anyone who retains a Russian heart and a sense of nobility, at a moment when the country needs people willing to serve it. Rather than claim moral innocence, he asks who among them is less guilty than the others and admits that he himself may bear considerable blame: he may have been too reserved and too quick to reject people who wished to help him. This acknowledgment complicates his position as judge, presenting reform as a responsibility he shares rather than a lesson he can impose from a distance.

The Informal Administration and the Unfinished Appeal

The address names the broader system behind the scandal. The country, the Prince says, suffers not from foreign invasion but from its own actions: alongside lawful government, a second administration has grown up with greater power than the system established by law. This shadow administration has set conditions, fixed prices, and circulated its tariff. The image shifts the speech from the misconduct of particular officials to a parallel structure of influence that operates through bribery and has acquired its own rules.

The Prince doubts that even the wisest ruler could do more than limit the damage by placing more upright supervisors over venal officials. Lasting change, he insists, requires each person to take a stand against dishonesty, as people once took up arms during upheavals among nations. He addresses the officials as fellow Russians bound to him by shared blood, urging them to set aside personal grievances and remember their obligations to the fatherland. In this passage, justice becomes both an administrative necessity and a civic appeal: the country’s danger arises from conduct within its own institutions, and its rescue therefore depends on those who serve within them.

That argument never reaches its conclusion. The Prince warns that the future looks dark, then the original manuscript ends abruptly before his sentence is complete. No response from the officials, decision on the proposed court-martial, or outcome of the appeal is supplied. The address closes the surviving narrative not with a resolution but with an unfinished summons to public duty, leaving the promised reckoning and the possibility of reform suspended together.