Kikichov and Samosvetov reached a bribe deal

The bribery agreement between Chichikov and Samosvitov is a prison-cell bargain in which Chichikov seeks complete exoneration by paying 30,000 roubles to an official network. Samosvitov promises not only to secure his release from the case but also to obtain compensation for his wasted time; the agreement’s decisive gesture is a handshake, by which a verbal offer becomes a pact. The scene brings the novel’s recurring collision between official procedure and private corruption into the prison itself.

The prison bargain

Samosvitov enters Chichikov’s cell after the door has been closed. He is a robust official, popular among his comrades and known for keeping his word, but he regards his superiors as a hostile position to be breached wherever a weakness appears. The narrator’s martial comparison makes his approach to bureaucracy resemble a campaign: he has no battlefield, so he turns his energies toward finding openings in the administrative hierarchy.

He tells Chichikov that everyone has heard of his plight and offers to act on his behalf. The price is 30,000 roubles, which he presents as fixed. Chichikov immediately asks whether payment will mean that he is completely exonerated. Samosvitov says that it will, adding that Chichikov will also receive compensation for his lost time. The offer therefore promises more than escape from immediate danger: it proposes to convert the injury of prosecution into a claim for restitution.

Price, recipients, and assurance

Chichikov asks how the money is to be paid. Samosvitov explains that the 30,000 roubles will be divided among the Governor-General’s staff and the Governor-General’s secretary. The bribe is thus described not as an isolated payment to a single intermediary but as a distribution within the offices surrounding authority. The episode exposes the shadow arrangement beneath official power: the same institutional ranks that could participate in Chichikov’s examination are now named as the intended beneficiaries of a deal to end it.

Chichikov raises a practical obstacle. His effects, including his dispatch-box, have been sealed and taken away for examination. Samosvitov answers that they will be returned to Chichikov’s hands within an hour. His assurance ties the promised result to control over the evidence and possessions at the center of the investigation, though the scene does not show the promised return or the final execution of the bargain. What it does establish is the confidence with which Samosvitov claims to be able to arrange access and influence from within the system.

The handshake and its limits

When Samosvitov asks whether they should seal the bargain with a handshake, Chichikov accepts. The gesture is accompanied by a beating heart: he can scarcely believe what he is hearing. His response registers both his dependence on the offer and his astonishment that such a direct route to exoneration is being proposed. Samosvitov then leaves, saying that he has instructed a mutual friend that silence and presence of mind are essential. Chichikov takes this friend to be his lawyer, suggesting that the deal is to be conducted through a circle of intermediaries rather than openly.

The agreement is a decisive change in the terms of Chichikov’s predicament, but not a narrated legal resolution. The scene ends with the bargain made and the machinery of concealment set in motion; it does not establish that Chichikov has actually been exonerated, received compensation, or recovered his dispatch-box. Its force lies in showing that the promise of a complete legal outcome has itself become a commodity offered through administrative connections.

Earlier dealings in legality and paperwork

The scene gains an added irony from Chichikov’s earlier insistence to Manilov that he would not step outside civil law. When the dead peasants’ purchase was discussed, he proposed recording them as living because the census returns still listed them that way. He claimed that an obligation was sacred and that he was silent in the presence of law. In the prison cell, however, his answer to a threatened prosecution is to agree to a large payment distributed among officials. The earlier language of obedience and the later agreement expose how readily legal form can serve contrary purposes in his dealings.

Across his transactions, documents and procedure repeatedly provide the means by which a questionable arrangement is made to look administratively workable. With Korobotchka, Chichikov explains that he will assume the dues on the dead peasants and transfer them to himself as serfs, so she will no longer have to pay tax on them or bribe the assessor. With Sobakevitch, he insists that a purchase deed should be drawn up so that everything is in order. Later, at the serf-affairs desk, he presents a purchase list for registration and says that he has brought some vendors while holding powers of attorney from the others. These transactions are distinct from the prison bribe, but together they show his persistent reliance on the gap between a transaction’s formal record and its underlying reality.

The bureaucratic world also has its own capacity to make paperwork absurdly impenetrable. At Colonel Koshkarev’s estate, a formal response denies the existence of any unmortgaged souls: the peasants are already pledged under first and second mortgages, with a specified exception involving Gurmailovka, a land-court caveat, and its publication in the Moscow Gazette. Chichikov protests that he has been made to dance around for nothing; Koshkarev answers that he had to understand the matter through documentary process. Against that episode’s maze of official forms, Samosvitov’s offer presents a different shortcut through institutional power—not an escape from administrative machinery, but an alleged ability to manipulate its personnel and decisions from within.

Narrative significance

The agreement condenses the novel’s account of official corruption into a personal exchange. Samosvitov is introduced as a man loyal to his given word, yet that reliability supports a corrupt undertaking rather than public duty. His promise is credible within the scene precisely because he presents himself as an effective operator against his superiors. Chichikov, for his part, accepts the bargain not through a fresh argument about legality but through a handshake, making consent—not the language of law—the scene’s crucial action.

The outcome remains deliberately limited to what the scene reveals: an offer, its price and intended recipients, Chichikov’s acceptance, and an instruction to preserve silence and composure. The bribe’s practical success is not demonstrated here. That unresolved boundary matters. The episode shows the machinery of corruption claiming to promise a legal result, while leaving the reader to distinguish a completed agreement from an accomplished release.