Kerson

Kherson is the southern province that gives Chichikov’s dead-soul scheme its fictional destination and legal pretext. Its land is said to be available almost for nothing if a purchaser undertakes to colonize it, allowing him to represent his dead serfs as people being transferred to a new settlement rather than as landless peasants illegally bought or mortgaged.

Kherson as a Proposed Destination

The province enters the scheme as a place where land can be acquired cheaply on the condition that it will be settled. Chichikov turns that condition into the cover for his plan: he will claim to be transferring the souls there, although the people listed in his papers are dead. The destination is not presented as a place he has settled or even selected in reality; it is a future settlement invoked to make a fraudulent transaction appear administratively credible.

The Paperwork of the Fiction

Chichikov intends the removal to take place in strict legal form. If officials demand testimony, he plans to produce a letter supposedly signed by the superintendent of the Kherson rural police—a post he would occupy himself. He also imagines naming the village Chichikovoe, or, more pointedly, Pavlovskoe, after his Christian name. The self-authored confirmation and self-named settlement complete the circular logic: the supposed authority and destination are both products of Chichikov’s own design.

Narrative Significance

Kherson links the scheme’s practical opportunity to its comic audacity. The province’s cheap land and colonization requirement supply a recognizable administrative rationale, but Chichikov’s proposed transfer rests on a village that exists only in anticipation and a testimonial he would write for himself. The contrast makes the fraud’s mechanism visible: the dead are made to travel on paper toward a place that has not yet been established, while the forms of official procedure lend the invention an appearance of order.