Chichikov’s impoverishment after the customs scandal

Chichikov’s impoverishment after the customs scandal is a decisive reversal, but not a moral conversion: stripped of nearly everything, he keeps his capacity for calculation and turns the experience into the occasion for a new fraud. The customs affair leaves him with ten thousand roubles, a small bachelor’s carriage, two servants, and little more; from this diminished position he will conceive the dead-souls scheme that sets the novel’s central journey in motion.

Exposure and the loss of fortune

The customs conspiracy collapses after Chichikov and his accomplice quarrel. The account gives competing explanations for their breach, including a dispute that leads to an anonymous denunciation and a separate story involving a woman; it does not settle which version is true. What is certain is the consequence: the contraband dealings are exposed, both officials are interrogated, deprived of their property, and required to put their actions in writing. Chichikov’s colleague sinks into obscurity, while Chichikov escapes a criminal trial through composure, persuasive speech, flattery, and discreet payments to officials.

That escape does not preserve his wealth. Although the authorities fail to uncover all his gains, Chichikov loses his capital and imported possessions. His remaining resources are precisely counted: ten thousand roubles set aside for a rainy day, two dozen linen shirts, a small carriage of the kind used by bachelors, and his servants Selifan and Petrushka. The Customs officials also give him a few cakes of the soap he had praised for keeping his cheeks fresh. The small personal remnant contrasts sharply with the fortune he had amassed through smuggling, and makes his return to precarious circumstances concrete rather than merely figurative.

Refusal of retreat

The narrator imagines the quiet life Chichikov might have chosen: settling in a provincial town, wearing a dressing-gown, listening to peasants quarrel on holidays, and visiting a poulterer to select chickens. Chichikov does not take that course. He feels injured by fate and resentful of the world, but the loss does not extinguish his energy or appetite for further experience. His self-command is presented as strenuous: he has to restrain a forceful temperament that would rather burst into action than accept a settled, diminished existence.

His private accounting of the disaster reveals how he understands his own conduct. He tells himself that he has not wronged the poor, robbed a widow, or driven anyone from a home, and argues that he merely took advantage of people who had more than their share. Since others would have profited in his place, he cannot see why they should prosper while he is reduced to the lowest condition. Yet his defense is inseparable from anxiety about reputation and inheritance. He imagines an honest father of a family judging him, and fears that future children will call him a brute for leaving them nothing. The thought of descendants is therefore both a justification for acquisition and a measure of the shame he cannot quite dismiss.

A new occupation and the originating idea

Necessity takes Chichikov into the work of an ordinary attorney, a poorly regarded calling without civic status. One commission requires him to place several hundred peasants from a ruined estate in the hands of the Public Trustee. The estate has been brought low by cattle disease, dishonest bailiffs, failed harvests, epidemics that have killed its best workers, and the owner’s extravagance: after furnishing a Moscow house in the latest style, the owner has spent his money and must mortgage what remains, including the peasants.

The legal business introduces Chichikov to the financial oddity on which his next scheme depends. Before officials will process the mortgage, he must entertain them and explain that half the estate’s peasants are dead. When a secretary asks whether those dead people still appear on the revision lists, Chichikov answers that they do. The secretary treats the discrepancy as ordinary: one person dies, another is born, and eventually the new person takes the old one’s place. Chichikov recognizes that the formal register continues to give dead peasants a usable status before a new revision list is made. The idea arises not from an abstract plan but from this practical encounter between recorded population and actual death.

From impoverishment to the dead-souls plan

Chichikov calculates that he could buy dead peasants before the next revision, then present them as settlers transferred to land in Kherson. He imagines that the Council of Public Trust might pay two hundred roubles for each and estimates that the scheme could produce a capital of two hundred thousand roubles. He reasons that landowners burdened with poll-tax payments would be glad to dispose of dead peasants, especially amid epidemics and the deterioration of estates. Since buying or mortgaging peasants without land is illegal, he proposes to disguise the transaction as a transfer for colonization, supported by formally prepared papers and purported testimony from a Kherson rural-police superintendent—who would, in his own conception, be himself. He even imagines naming the supposed settlement Chichikovoe or Pavlovskoe.

The narrator identifies this conception as the scheme that makes the story possible. Chichikov crosses himself and sets out to carry it through, inspecting different parts of the Russian Empire, especially districts affected by failed harvests, high mortality, or other misfortunes that could lower the cost of acquiring dead souls. His approach remains calculated: he chooses landowners with whom similar agreements are likely to be made easily and first tries to establish acquaintance, or even friendship, in hopes of getting the souls without payment. The impoverishment is thus not an endpoint but the hinge between two rounds of acquisition. The loss of his customs fortune exposes the persistence of his ambition; the attorney’s case supplies the legal and economic opening through which that ambition takes its next form.