Korobotchka's nighttime dead-soul deal is a private transaction transformed, through rumor, into a tale of armed menace and public disorder. In the account relayed to two women in N. City, Korobotchka says Pavel Ivanovitch Chichikov arrived at her home at night, insisted that her dead serfs were alive, and made her sign a paper for fifteen roubles. Her story leaves the listeners not only frightened but newly convinced that the phrase “dead souls” conceals more than they understand.

The Story Reaches the City

The account arrives indirectly. One woman tells her friend that she has just heard it from Father Cyril’s wife, who had received a visit from Korobotchka at the Archpriest’s house. Korobotchka had appeared pale and trembling, and her tale—passed from one woman to another—has acquired the vivid urgency of a nocturnal alarm. The visitor recounting it is so shaken that she says she could not speak when her coachman asked where to go; she ordered her carriage only to hurry to her friend with the news.

The framing conversation initially bends the report toward romantic gossip. Asked what their charming gentleman visitor has turned out to be, one woman guesses he is the man who built the Archpriest a poultry-run. When she hears that the landowner was an old woman, she jokes about the supposed suitor’s taste. The correction—that the visitor came armed and demanded dead souls—abruptly replaces flirtation with fear.

The Night Visit and the Sale

In Korobotchka’s reported account, the disturbance begins at dead of night, after everyone has retired. Someone knocks violently and cries, “Open the gates, or we will break them down!” Chichikov is described as armed from head to foot when he calls on the elderly landowner. The story makes the transaction sound less like negotiation than an intrusion, and the frightened visitor presents the scene as so alarming that the whole village comes running; children scream and men shout, while no one understands what is happening.

Chichikov asks Korobotchka to sell the souls of people who have recently died. She objects that they have departed this world and cannot be sold. He counters that they are not dead, insisting that they remain alive and invoking his own authority to settle the matter. The account thus sets the ordinary fact of death against the buyer’s startling claim, making the disagreement itself the source of the episode’s strangeness.

Paper, Payment, and Fear

Korobotchka reportedly says that Chichikov threw her fifteen roubles and forced her to sign a worthless paper. As she is represented in the story, she is an inexperienced, defenseless widow who knows nothing of business; the transaction is therefore narrated as an exploitation she could neither understand nor resist. The document and payment give the uncanny-sounding demand a concrete form: whatever the status of the dead serfs, a sale has been put on paper.

The teller’s fear becomes part of the episode’s evidence and its distortion. She recalls being so pale that her maid Mashka urged her to look in a mirror, yet she had no time to do so before rushing to report what she had heard. The tale reaches the city not as a verified account but through successive retellings, charged by the teller’s alarm and by her certainty that something horrible has occurred.

Rumor and Unresolved Meaning

The hostess observes that she has heard of dead souls before. Her husband had said that Nozdrev was lying, but she now suspects that there was “a grain of truth” in his lies. Korobotchka’s story therefore does more than repeat a disturbing accusation: it gives earlier talk a seeming corroboration, though the listeners still cannot determine what the transactions mean.

One woman concludes that more lies beneath the phrase than the dead souls themselves, and her friend agrees. The claim does not resolve the mystery; instead, it opens another layer of speculation, as the friend immediately asks what might be hidden beneath it all. The episode’s consequence is thus an expanding public suspicion: an obscure purchase, retold as a night raid, becomes a clue whose meaning the town cannot yet grasp.