Chichikov's deal with Korobochka is an episode in which a sale of dead serfs becomes possible through the gap between their actual deaths and their continued presence in the state’s records. Chichikov presents the transaction as a practical way to relieve Korobochka of taxes, while arranging to acquire names he can treat as living property. Her hesitation makes the bargain more than a clever trick: it shows how a system of census, taxation, and transfer can turn the dead into negotiable assets.

Background and the terms of the bargain

Under serfdom, landowners remained liable for taxes on serfs listed at the last census, even when those people had since died. Chichikov’s larger scheme takes advantage of that lag: he buys the dead “souls” cheaply, assembles them on paper as fictitious living serfs, and intends to use the list as security for a loan. The value of the bargain therefore depends not on the dead people’s labor but on the administrative record that continues to count them.

Korobochka has a direct reason to consider selling. She tells Chichikov that eighteen of her peasants have died, all of them good workers, yet she must continue paying for them as if they were alive. She also recalls the recent death of her blacksmith in a fire, lamenting the loss of so capable a craftsman. Her account joins the economic abstraction of the “souls” to the actual loss of workers on whom her household depends.

Explaining an unfamiliar transaction

Korobochka does not initially understand what Chichikov means by buying the dead. She asks whether she is expected to dig them out of the ground. Chichikov recognizes her confusion and explains that the transfer will occur only on paper, with the names listed as still alive. Her question about what use dead souls could be to him meets his refusal to disclose his own business; he insists that it is his affair.

He then frames the sale as relief for the seller. Since Korobochka continues to pay tax on the dead, he argues, his plan will free her from both the tax and its associated trouble. He offers fifteen roubles per soul. But the explanation does not immediately settle the matter: Korobochka says she has never sold dead souls and remains unsure. The scene’s tension comes from the collision of two ways of understanding the same names—Chichikov treats them as entries that can be transferred, while she keeps returning to the fact that the people are dead.

From resistance to agreement

The negotiation takes more than a simple offer and acceptance. Korobochka’s uncertainty and resistance test Chichikov’s patience, and he presses her to recognize that the dead are no use to her. Eventually she agrees to sell the souls for fifteen roubles each. Her acceptance completes the central exchange, but it does not make the transaction morally or materially ordinary: the price is attached to human beings who have died, while the official record continues to treat them as taxable and transferable.

Korobochka also asks Chichikov not to forget her if he later needs rye meal, buckwheat, groats, or dead meat. Her list pulls the bargain back toward the practical economy of her estate, where provisions and stock matter alongside the paper sale. Chichikov, sweating heavily after the strained negotiation, assures her that he will not forget her. The contrast is pointed: he has pursued an elaborate financial scheme, while she immediately imagines the connection as a possible market for her other goods.

Paperwork and the transaction’s consequences

The deal requires more than a spoken agreement. Korobochka names the son of the archpriest, Father Cyril, as a lawyer who can act in town. Chichikov asks her to give this man power of attorney and offers to write the necessary letter at once. The practical details convert an improbable proposal into an administrative transfer: a representative is to be authorized, and a document is to be prepared so the sale can proceed beyond the household conversation.

The episode exemplifies the mechanism behind Chichikov’s larger plan. The dead remain on the revision lists, and a formal transfer can make their paper status useful to him even though they cannot work or live. Elsewhere, his idea originates in the recognition that a dead person still entered on the revision rolls could be bought before a new census and used to seek money from the Council of Public Trust. The transaction with Korobochka thus belongs to a wider scheme in which legal form does not correct the mismatch between records and reality; it allows that mismatch to be exploited.

Narrative significance

The scene makes an administrative absurdity legible through a comic mismatch of expectations. Chichikov speaks in the language of tax relief, prices, authority, and paperwork; Korobochka repeatedly returns to the plain fact that the people are dead and to the practical concerns of her estate. Neither the names nor the legal procedure restore the lives that have been lost. Instead, the continuing tax obligation gives the names a price, and the proposed documents give that price a route into commerce.

The bargain also clarifies why Chichikov’s plan can travel from estate to estate: it converts a structural defect in the census system into a transaction that each landowner can be invited to regard as advantageous. Korobochka’s eventual consent advances the scheme, while her continued attention to prices and provisions keeps its human and material setting in view. In the sale, the administrative category of a “soul” becomes at once a dead person, a tax liability, a negotiable name, and a possible basis for credit.