Mikhail Semenovich Sobchakovich

Sobakevitch is a substantial landowner whose bear-like body, blunt speech, and practical attention to value make him one of the most physically and verbally forceful figures in Chichikov’s dealings. He treats the proposed purchase of dead serfs as an ordinary transaction, praises the dead as skilled workers, and later helps expose the contradiction at the heart of the business by naming a dead wheelwright as one of the men Chichikov has bought.

Identity and Introduction

Chichikov first encounters Sobakevitch at his estate, where the house and its surroundings suggest an unusual commitment to solidity. The building has lost one of its four original columns, but the courtyard fence is high and strong, the stables and coach-house are made partly of beams expected to last for centuries, and even the peasants’ huts and the mansion’s oak draw-well are conspicuously sturdy. Everything appears fitted to its place and made to endure. The estate’s material order provides a pointed setting for its owner: a man who prizes robust construction and tangible usefulness.

Sobakevitch’s appearance turns that impression into caricature. Chichikov sees a man resembling a moderate-sized bear, dressed in a long frockcoat and baggy trousers the color of a bear’s hide. He shuffles with a criss-cross movement and repeatedly steps on his companion’s toes. The narrator imagines that nature fashioned him roughly, as if a few blows of a hatchet and thrusts of a drill had sufficed to make a nose, lips, and eyes. Sobakevitch seldom turns his head toward the person speaking; his gaze tends instead toward a stove corner or doorway. His Christian name and patronymic are Michael Semenovitch, and he is also addressed as Michael Semenovitch in the negotiation with Chichikov.

The bear comparison is more than a visual joke: it sets up a character whose force seems resistant to refinement or display. At intervals Sobakevitch recognizes that he has trodden on Chichikov’s toes and asks whether he has hurt him; Chichikov, taking care to let his host lead, replies politely that he has not. Physical bulk, awkwardness, and a measure of awareness coexist in the encounter.

Judgment of the Provincial Gentry

Sobakevitch’s conversation with Chichikov shows the same bluntness as his bearing. When Chichikov offers a guardedly favorable assessment of the President of the Local Council, Sobakevitch asks whether the official really seemed so admirable, calls him a mason, and declares him the greatest fool in the world. Chichikov starts at the mordant judgment but quickly recovers and continues to praise the President as an excellent fellow. Their exchange establishes a contrast: Sobakevitch says openly what Chichikov, alert to social advantage, habitually softens or conceals.

His response to the dead-soul proposal is equally unsentimental. As Chichikov approaches the subject cautiously, Sobakevitch listens with a barely perceptible change in expression. The narrator describes him as a body seemingly without a soul—or as if any soul he possessed were buried beneath mountains or shut inside a massive shell, unable to disturb the surface. Then Sobakevitch asks directly whether Chichikov is after dead souls. He shows no surprise and speaks as though the subject were grain. Chichikov confirms the purpose and tries to soften the expression, but Sobakevitch has already named the transaction plainly.

The Sale and Its Bargaining

Sobakevitch accepts that the dead serfs can be sold and immediately turns the discussion toward price. When Chichikov protests at the sum and asks for a genuine price, Sobakevitch accuses him of hanging back with his money and insists that he is asking little. He distinguishes himself from a hypothetical dishonest seller who would pass off old rubbish in place of good souls, claiming that he would offer his best even if the purchase were only nut-kernels. The salesmanship is brazen: he speaks of the dead as valuable goods while presenting his own willingness to sell them as proof of his integrity.

His argument depends on specific reputations for skill. Sobakevitch praises Michiev as a wheelwright who built spring carts entirely by himself, varnishing included, and contrasts that workmanship with Moscow products good for only an hour. He then turns to the carpenter Probka Stepan, describing him as exceptionally strong, over three arshins tall, and formerly a Guardsman. These claims give the negotiation its comic force: Sobakevitch’s catalogue of labor and craftsmanship is vivid and confident precisely because the men being praised are dead. Chichikov begins to point out that Michiev has long since departed this world, but Sobakevitch’s eloquence continues without allowing an interruption.

The conversation makes the seller’s practical vocabulary inseparable from the novel’s underlying legal and economic absurdity. The men are dead, yet they retain, in the terms of the bargain, names, trades, qualities, and prices. Sobakevitch does not disguise the transaction with Chichikov’s initial euphemistic hesitation; instead, he turns its contradiction into a sales pitch and haggles over its terms.

Registration and Exposure

Sobakevitch remains attentive to procedure when the sale reaches official registration. Before the indentures are handled, he reminds the President that witnesses must attend, with no fewer than two on behalf of each party. He proposes summoning the Public Prosecutor, whom he describes as having little to do and even that little done by his chief clerk, Zolotucha, along with the Inspector of the Medical Department, whom he expects may be at home unless he has gone to a card party. He dismisses other officials as men who cumber the ground for nothing. The President agrees and sends a clerk for those named. Sobakevitch’s scorn for official idleness thus accompanies a careful insistence on the formal witnesses the transaction requires.

At the registration, Sobakevitch himself punctures the fiction that the purchase concerns ordinary living property. He asks why Chichikov will not tell the President exactly what he has bought and announces that he has sold him his wheelwright, Michiev. The President recognizes the name and praises Michiev’s craftsmanship, then objects that Sobakevitch had recently said the man was dead. Sobakevitch’s boast, first deployed to raise the value of a sale, becomes a public disclosure of its impossible status. The detail that makes the dead man sound most useful also makes the fraud hardest to ignore.

Relations and Narrative Significance

Sobakevitch’s dealings with Chichikov are shaped by mutual calculation rather than trust. He identifies the purpose of the visit without ceremony, negotiates aggressively, and uses the supposed quality of the dead men to defend his price. Chichikov, in turn, tries to manage the wording and cost of the exchange, but cannot entirely control the terms once Sobakevitch begins speaking. The seller’s bluntness exposes the practical logic beneath the buyer’s euphemisms: both treat dead serfs as transferable property, while Sobakevitch makes that logic unusually explicit.

His treatment of other officials extends this portrait from private bargaining into the social world of the province. At the sale’s registration he names idle officeholders and demands witnesses; later, when the officials investigate Chichikov, Sobakevitch calls him an excellent fellow and says the souls sold to him were in the truest sense alive. Yet he declines responsibility for what may happen during the transfer, suggesting that death from fever and other mortal complaints is common and that whole villages have perished. His defense is both self-protective and grotesquely consistent with the language of the sale: he insists on the men’s vitality when it supports the transaction, then invokes mortality when the authorities question its consequences.

As the officials try to identify Chichikov, Sobakevitch’s confident account does not resolve their uncertainty. His claim that the purchased souls were genuinely alive supplies them no reliable explanation, while his qualification that he cannot answer for what happened afterward preserves his distance from the affair. The novel uses him to sharpen its satire of property and bureaucracy: the same system can record the dead as saleable people, require witnesses to certify the transfer, and leave officials unable to settle what the transaction means. Sobakevitch’s sturdy world of objects and workmanship proves less stable when the object being traded is a human life.