Chichikov’s purchase of dead serfs from Korobochka

Chichikov’s purchase of dead serfs from Korobochka is a negotiation in which death becomes both a continuing tax liability and a saleable asset. Korobochka agrees to transfer the deceased peasants in exchange for fifteen roubles apiece after Chichikov argues that she is paying tax on people who have died; she also identifies a local lawyer who can complete the transfer. The episode makes the scheme’s machinery tangible: a personal loss to the landowner can be converted into a paper population, while the state’s outdated register keeps charging for the dead.

Background and Economic Logic

The transaction depends on the census and taxation system of serfdom. Between periodic revisions of the rolls, deceased peasants can remain registered as living. Their owners therefore continue to pay tax on them, while the names can also be used in financial arrangements: the broader plan is to buy the names cheaply, assemble them into a fictitious list of serfs, and mortgage that list to raise money. Chichikov intends to use the proceeds to acquire an estate and living serfs. A bureaucratic lag thus creates an opening for speculation: the dead remain economically active in official records even when they no longer exist as workers.

The scheme has an earlier origin in Chichikov’s work as an attorney. While handling the transfer of peasants from a ruined estate, he learns that dead people still listed on the revision rolls need not prevent a legal transaction; an official reasons that one dead soul will eventually be replaced by another born and grown to adulthood. Chichikov recognizes that the same administrative fiction might be turned to private advantage. He imagines acquiring dead souls before a new revision, presenting them as settlers transferred to Kherson, and using the resulting list to obtain a large loan. His encounter with Korobochka is one practical realization of that plan, conducted through direct bargaining rather than through the abstract calculations with which it began.

Korobochka’s Losses and Hesitation

When Chichikov asks whether she has lost peasants in recent years, Korobochka answers that eighteen have died. She remembers them as good workers and contrasts them with the young people who have since grown up, whom she considers of little use. Her account gives the transaction a material history: these are not merely names that have vanished from a ledger, but laborers whose deaths have altered the household’s working capacity. She also complains that the dead continue to incur tax, making the discrepancy between the register and the estate an immediate financial burden.

Her recollection of a blacksmith extends that sense of loss. He died after drinking heavily, and she describes him as a clever craftsman whose absence has left her without anyone to shoe her horses. Chichikov’s purchase proposal arrives in a world where the dead remain chargeable to their owner but cannot perform the work for which they were once valued. The administrative category of a taxable soul and the practical memory of a skilled worker coexist in Korobochka’s account, but they are not the same thing.

Korobochka does not treat the sale as self-evident. She points out that she has never sold dead souls before and says she does not know what to do. Chichikov recasts the deal as relief: because she must continue paying tax on the deceased, she loses money by keeping them on the books; he will remove that burden and pay fifteen roubles for each. His argument makes the transaction appear to serve her interests, even as it supplies him with the names his scheme requires. Her uncertainty is not resolved by an abstract explanation of the law so much as by the immediate promise of payment and the prospect of escaping an ongoing expense.

Bargaining and Completion

The negotiation does not proceed smoothly. After an argument, Korobochka agrees to the fifteen-rouble price and broadens the exchange by offering to remember Chichikov if he needs rye meal, buckwheat, groats, or dead meat. Her offer places the unusual purchase alongside ordinary provisions and commercial dealings. Chichikov, perspiring heavily, assures her that he will not forget her, then asks whether she has an acquaintance or agent in town who can arrange the transfer. The bodily strain of the haggling marks the effort required to turn an unfamiliar proposition into a settled bargain.

Korobochka supplies a practical route to completion: the son of the archpriest, Father Cyril, is a lawyer. Chichikov asks her to give the lawyer power of attorney and offers to write the necessary letter himself. The scene therefore moves beyond agreement on a price toward the documents and delegated authority needed to transfer the peasants. The legal form is central to the transaction: Chichikov needs more than a verbal bargain, because his larger project depends on names that can pass through official procedures as property.

The purchase also recalls the earlier bargain with Manilov, who surrendered his dead souls unconditionally and offered to bear the expenses. With Korobochka, by contrast, Chichikov must explain the tax burden, negotiate a fixed price, overcome her reluctance, and arrange representation. The difference shows how the same proposal changes according to the seller: Manilov’s generosity removes the price question, whereas Korobochka’s caution makes the practical and financial terms the scene’s action.

Paper, Property, and the Plot’s Irony

The wider chain of transactions clarifies what the purchase makes possible. At Sobakevitch’s, Chichikov inspects a carefully prepared list that records each serf’s trade, age, and pedigree, with marginal notes on conduct and sobriety. Such detail gives the document the appearance of a precise account of human lives, even though the people being traded are dead. Korobochka’s agreement contributes to the same transformation: persons once remembered as workers become transferable entries that can be priced, registered, and assembled into a financial asset.

The irony lies in the gap between lived reality and official status. Korobochka can recall the eighteen dead and the blacksmith’s skill; the tax system continues to count them; and Chichikov sees in their names the possibility of capital. These are not simply competing descriptions of the same thing. Her account registers lost labor and household consequences, while his calculation depends on preserving the administrative fiction that the dead remain available as property. The purchase makes that fiction profitable precisely because the paperwork has outlasted the people it records.

As an episode in Chichikov’s journey through Russia, the deal also turns a broad economic mechanism into a local encounter. The scheme requires him to travel from estate to estate, persuading owners whose circumstances and temperaments differ, and the dead-soul list accumulates through those separate negotiations. Korobochka’s purchase shows how the larger fraud is built from ordinary incentives—avoiding tax, receiving payment, granting an agent authority—rather than from a single spectacular deception. Its decisive result is an agreement to transfer the names, but its significance rests in the contrast that agreement exposes: a dead person may have ceased to live, yet remain present as labor remembered, tax owed, and property claimed.