Chichikov’s visit to Colonel Koshkarev’s estate turns a straightforward request to confirm the purchase of dead serfs into an absurd bureaucratic ordeal. The Colonel’s elaborate offices cannot accomplish the transaction they are meant to handle: paperwork replaces judgment, departments have vanished or been reorganized, and the eventual official explanation makes the dead sound merely close to death. Chichikov leaves without his business completed, while Koshkarev interprets the failure as an opportunity to improve the machinery of administration by creating another committee.

Background and Purpose

Chichikov comes to Koshkarev’s estate on the advice of Kostanzhoglo, who sends him there to pursue the confirmation of his purchase. A half-hour drive brings him to a village in conspicuous disorder. Building and repair work is underway everywhere; alleys are clogged with lime, bricks, and timber, and some huts have been converted into offices bearing gilt-lettered signs. Among them are a Depot for Agricultural Implements, a Chief Office of Accounts, an Estate Works Committee, and a Normal School for the Education of Colonists. The grand labels promise organized management, but the obstructed lanes and improvised premises already suggest a system whose administrative ambition exceeds its practical order.

The Colonel receives Chichikov behind a desk, a pen between his teeth, and launches into an account of the labor that has brought the estate to prosperity. He complains that the peasants do not understand the incentives to work supplied by science and art. His examples are revealingly remote from Chichikov’s immediate concern: he regrets that the women do not wear corsets, invokes the German miller’s daughter who can play the piano, and imagines peasants reading Franklin’s notes on electricity, Virgil’s Georgics, or works on soil chemistry as they walk behind the plough. He also predicts that German clothing will advance science and trade and usher in a Golden Age in Russia. Faced with this program of improvement, Chichikov can only wait for a chance to state that he has come to acquire a few souls and have the purchase confirmed.

A Request Turned into Procedure

The Colonel translates Chichikov’s request into administrative language: the visitor must submit a written Statement of Plea, which will be forwarded to the Office for the Reception of Reports and Returns. That office, he explains, will consider it and send it back to him; he will then dispatch it to the Estate Works Committee, which will revise it and present it to the Administrator and Secretary. When Chichikov tries to cut through the sequence and explain aloud that the souls are dead, Koshkarev does not reconsider the process. Instead, he directs him to put that fact into the statement.

The procedural logic becomes still more absurd when Chichikov clarifies that, although the souls are dead, they must be represented as alive. The Colonel tells him to include that requirement in writing too, offering a menu of formal expressions—whether it is necessary, requested, desiderated, or prayed that they be represented as alive. Without such documentation, he insists, the matter cannot proceed. He rings for a Secretary and orders him to summon a Commissioner, who is to escort Chichikov around the offices. The desired outcome is thus stated plainly, but the administration can approach it only as a phrase to be entered into the correct form.

The Offices That Cannot Act

The escorted tour exposes the distance between the estate’s administrative design and its working reality. The Committee for the Reception of Reports and Returns has shut its doors: its Director has been transferred to the newly formed Committee of Estate Management, and his successor has been absorbed by the same committee. At the Department of Estate Affairs, repair work has left the quarters inaccessible; the only person who answers the summons is a drunken peasant, from whom the visitors can get no sensible information.

The Commissioner offers a blunt diagnosis. The drunken man, he says, leads the master by the nose; the Committee of Management takes people away from their proper work and assigns them other duties, and everything is ruled through that committee. The remark punctures the Colonel’s vision of a coordinated estate. Rather than a chain of offices that divides and completes useful work, Chichikov encounters an organization in which personnel have been moved, departments have disappeared, and the power to act has gathered in a committee accused of disrupting the very work it governs.

A Documentary Answer and Chichikov’s Exit

Chichikov returns to the Colonel and reports that the Office for the Reception of Reports and Returns no longer exists. Koshkarev reacts with noble indignation, thanks his visitor for supplying the information, and begins writing a series of searching questions. They concern why the Committee of Management has issued orders beyond its jurisdiction, why a chief manager has allowed his predecessor to follow him into another department, and why the Committee of Estate Affairs has permitted the reporting office to lapse. The failed attempt to secure confirmation has become, in the Colonel’s hands, a new occasion to investigate how the estate is managed.

Koshkarev then insists that Chichikov stay: his own honor is involved, and he wants his people to see proper, organized estate administration in operation. He assigns the matter to an educated member of his staff and provides a library equipped with notebooks, paper, and pens so that Chichikov can prepare the required document. A report is read aloud. It argues that Chichikov’s use of the word dead is mistaken: because the soul is deathless, the petition must mean souls approaching death rather than souls actually deceased. The correction does not resolve the practical issue; it recasts it as a defect in the petitioner’s terminology.

The report supplies a second obstacle. There are no unmortgaged souls on the estate: all have been pledged under first mortgages and again under second mortgages, at 150 roubles per soul. The sole exception is the village of Gurmailovka, whose status is entangled in a lawsuit and a published caveat that places it under the jurisdiction of the court. Chichikov angrily asks why this was not made clear before he was made to go through the procedure. Koshkarev replies that the forms were necessary so the matter could be seen consciously, not merely subconsciously. For Chichikov, that distinction is the last straw. He grabs his cap and rushes out of the house.

The Committee That Follows the Failure

Even the carriage journey out is caught in the logic of paperwork. The driver has not taken out the horses, knowing that doing so would require a Statement of Plea for fodder and a twenty-four-hour wait for a resolution granting it. The detail carries the estate’s administrative paralysis beyond the office doors: delay has become so predictable that the driver anticipates it before the request is even made.

Koshkarev pursues Chichikov to the gates and warmly thanks him for making it possible to demonstrate proper estate management. He argues that matters must be kept moving lest the machinery grow rusty, then announces the idea prompted by the visit: a Committee of Supervision of the Committee of Management, charged with detecting backsliders in the existing committee. Chichikov eventually returns, tired and dissatisfied, to Kostanzhoglo’s mansion after dark, with the candles already lit. The journey produces no confirmation of his purchase; instead, the estate answers administrative failure by proposing another layer of administration.

Narrative Significance

The episode’s comedy depends on the contrast between Chichikov’s bluntly practical objective and Koshkarev’s devotion to documentary forms. Chichikov needs the purchased souls treated as alive, while the Colonel’s system can only process that need by turning it into carefully worded petitions, departmental referrals, and an official report. The report’s distinction between souls that are dead and souls approaching death is not a solution but a verbal maneuver, and its claims about mortgages close off the purchase on the estate anyway.

Koshkarev is not portrayed as indifferent to administration; he is eager to demonstrate its proper operation. That eagerness makes the failure more pointed. He treats closed offices, displaced officials, and an unusable department not as evidence that the system has lost its purpose but as grounds for more scrutiny and another committee. The unremoved horses condense the same logic into a practical consequence: even departure is imagined as a process awaiting authorization. Chichikov’s frustrated exit supplies the episode’s decisive reversal. He arrives seeking an official result and leaves having furnished Koshkarev with a fresh administrative project.