The unnamed provincial town becomes the threshold between Chichikov’s imprisonment and an uncertain departure: he is pardoned through Murazov’s intervention, but only on condition that he leave at once. At the same time, the town is the seat of an official scandal whose tangled investigation and compromised paperwork prompt the Governor-General to summon the local bureaucracy and contemplate a military tribunal. The town thus holds two endings in uneasy parallel: Chichikov escapes its immediate reach, while the public crisis he helped set in motion remains unresolved.

Setting and Immediate Crisis

When the Governor-General is overwhelmed by the scandal’s complexity, the town is already burdened by emergencies across the province. Famine has appeared in one district, where officials assigned to distribute food have performed badly. In another, Old Believers have been stirred by a report that an Antichrist is buying the dead; while calling people to prayer and repentance, they have also beaten groups of people in the name of capturing him. Elsewhere, a rumor that peasants would become landowners has helped provoke resistance to taxes and forced measures against a fiscal district. These simultaneous crises leave the Governor-General despondent even before he receives news that Murazov, who has gone bail for Chichikov, is waiting to see him.

The town is therefore more than a backdrop for Chichikov’s private legal danger. Its authorities face famine, religious panic, peasant unrest, and an investigation whose false reports and missing documents have made ordinary procedure difficult. The strain on public administration gives the personal case a broader setting: the Governor-General must decide what to do about Chichikov while also confronting a province whose problems exceed a single scandal.

Chichikov’s Release and Departure

Murazov asks the Governor-General to let Chichikov go and recommends that he be ordered out of town. The Governor-General agrees, instructing Murazov to tell him to depart as quickly as possible and to go as far away as he can. He also makes clear that Chichikov’s pardon is due to Murazov’s efforts. The town’s role in Chichikov’s story changes at that moment from the place of his confinement to a place he must leave without delay.

Murazov carries the order to the prisoner and warns him that the attempted rescue engineered by others may bring down not only its principal agent but also those implicated with him. Chichikov is found eating a hearty dinner brought from an excellent kitchen, a concrete sign that his circumstances in prison have not been wholly austere. Yet Murazov reads his dealings with the bribery network as a departure from the more serious frame of mind he had previously shown and urges him not to treat the danger lightly.

After Murazov leaves, Chichikov is plunged in thought and acknowledges to himself that it is time to move. He leaves the prison with a warder carrying his effects and finds Selifan and Petrushka delighted to see their master free. His first practical instruction is to pack and go. Selifan agrees that the roads have become firmer after snowfall and says he is weary of the town; the departure is both an official command and a release from a place that has become painful to him.

The Town as a Place of Exit

Chichikov does not make farewell visits, which recent events might have made awkward. Instead, he quietly visits the shop where he bought cloth for his latest suit and orders four more arshins of the same smoked-grey material shot with flame colour. By offering the tailor double payment, he secures overnight work so that a new coat and breeches will be ready by morning. The detail makes his departure characteristically practical: even under pressure, he attends to clothing and appearance, arranging one last purchase rather than attempting a social leave-taking.

While the horses are being put to, Chichikov tries on the finished clothes. He notices a bald patch and regrets having torn out so much of his hair in despair. After paying the tailor, he leaves town. The narrator marks the departure as a profound change rather than a simple escape: Chichikov is no longer the man he was, but a ruin awaiting reconstruction, like a building pulled down before plans for its replacement have arrived. Murazov has already departed by an earlier route, travelling in a tilt-waggon with Ivan Potapitch. The town empties its two central figures separately, without offering either a settled destination or a completed resolution.

The Officials and the Unresolved Scandal

An hour after Chichikov leaves, the Governor-General notifies officials of every rank that, before departing for Saint Petersburg, he wishes to meet them privately. They gather at his residence and wait with apprehension. His appearance gives them little clue to his mood: he looks neither clear nor dull, but carries himself proudly and walks with assurance. The scene shifts the focus from Chichikov’s hurried exit to the town’s public reckoning.

Addressing the officials, the Governor-General describes a scandal that has exposed further dishonourable matters and implicated people he had believed honourable. He says he knows both the purpose of those who have made the affair nearly impossible to resolve by ordinary methods and the identity of the ringleader, despite efforts to conceal that person’s part. His account connects the town’s institutional crisis to the earlier confusion surrounding Chichikov, but the speech does not identify the ringleader by name in this passage.

The Governor-General proposes to handle the affair not through formal documentary proceedings but by a court-martial, subject to receiving imperial authority after the circumstances have been laid before the Emperor. He points to documents that have been burned, an excess of false and extraneous evidence, and fictitious reports intended to obscure an already difficult investigation. His proposed remedy signals how far trust in ordinary civil procedure has deteriorated; he ends by asking the officials for their opinion, leaving the confrontation and the town’s political future open rather than resolved.

Narrative Significance

The town’s closing scenes set private flight against public accountability. Chichikov receives freedom only in the form of expulsion, and the image of his departure emphasizes damage and incompletion rather than triumph. Meanwhile, the Governor-General remains amid crises that cannot be settled simply by sending one man away. The town is at once the site of a personal escape and the center of an administrative emergency, and neither movement supplies a conclusive ending: Chichikov leaves as a diminished figure, while the proposed tribunal awaits authorization and the officials’ response.