Nastasia Petrovna Korobotchka

Nastasia Petrovna Korobotchka is a widow and landowner whose anxious thrift governs her first meeting with Chichikov and finally shapes his purchase of eighteen deceased peasants. The bargain is more than a comic misunderstanding: it reveals a world in which dead people remain financially present on the rolls, while Korobotchka’s practical caution makes even an extraordinary proposal feel like a question of prices, paperwork, and future trade.

Identity and First Appearance

Korobotchka is introduced at night, when Chichikov arrives wet, cold, and exhausted at her estate. He nearly falls as he hurries from the britchka; the room he is shown contains old striped curtains, pictures of birds, small antique mirrors with letters, playing cards, or a stocking tucked behind them, and a clock with a flowered dial. Too sleepy to study it closely, Chichikov soon meets the mistress of the house: an elderly woman in a hastily put-on nightcap and a flannel neck wrap. Her household and dress establish an unceremonious, tightly kept domestic world rather than a polished estate.

The narrator places her among landowning women who lament failed harvests and losses while quietly putting money into striped purses, each reserved for a different denomination. They appear to keep cupboards for linen, nightshirts, wool, and shabby cloth saved for a future dress; in practice, their careful hoarding ensures that the cloth remains unused, sometimes until it can be passed to a relative. Korobotchka’s characterization thus begins as a recognizable type of rural thrift: anxiety about scarcity coexists with the persistent accumulation of small sums and household goods.

The Estate and Its Owner

The conversation gives Korobotchka a concrete economic position. She says her village contains a little fewer than eighty souls and complains that a failed harvest the previous year has cost her heavily. She identifies herself by her formal name and status: Korobotchka, the widow of a Collegiate Secretary, and gives her Christian name and patronymic as Nastasia Petrovna. Her estate is small enough for the reported number of peasants to be readily grasped, but its losses and obligations weigh on her conversation from the outset.

Her concern is not only the harvest. When Chichikov asks whether many peasants have died in recent years, she counts eighteen, sighs over the loss, and remembers them as good workers. Although younger people have grown up in their place, she regards them as no substitute for the experienced laborers. She also recalls that her blacksmith burned to death the previous week, emphasizing his skill. The deaths register for her simultaneously as personal losses to the working household and as an ongoing financial burden: although the men are dead, she says she must continue paying for them as if they were alive.

The Proposed Sale

Chichikov’s unusual business is initially beyond Korobotchka’s understanding. When he offers to buy the dead peasants, she asks whether she is supposed to dig them out of the ground. He recognizes that she has not grasped the transaction and explains that the transfer will occur on paper: the deceased souls will be listed as still alive. Her direct question about what use they could be to him does not produce an explanation; Chichikov answers that the purpose is his own affair.

The offer therefore depends on a sharp distinction between physical death and administrative status. Korobotchka has already described the cost of continuing to pay for deceased peasants, but that does not immediately make the paper sale intelligible or reassuring. Chichikov tries to make the bargain attractive by comparing it with her honey: honey represents goods produced through a year’s care and labor, whereas the dead peasants, he insists, have cost her no exertion in this case. He offers fifteen paper roubles for each, more than the twelve roubles per pood she has received for honey. His arithmetic is designed to turn the transfer into easy profit.

Bargaining and Relationship with Chichikov

Korobotchka does not accept at once. Even after Chichikov’s sales pitch, she worries that business has come to her unexpectedly as a widow and considers waiting for other buyers so she can compare prices. Her hesitation is not based on a claim that the dead can literally be recovered; it grows from fear of making a poor bargain and uncertainty about an unfamiliar commodity. She even wonders aloud whether the souls might prove useful to her. The possibility of a better offer matters more to her than the buyer’s insistence that nobody else would want them.

Chichikov responds with mounting irritation. Korobotchka asks why he is angry, saying that if she had known he would lose his temper she would not have raised the subject. He presses her to understand the bargain, and she finally agrees to sell at fifteen roubles each. The agreement comes after resistance and pressure, not from an immediate grasp of the transaction’s purpose. Chichikov’s relief is visible in the three separate streams of perspiration running down his face as he wipes his forehead.

Even in settling the sale, Korobotchka frames the relationship as an ongoing exchange. She asks him not to forget her if he later needs rye meal, buckwheat, groats, or dead meat. The list puts the extraordinary sale beside ordinary provisions: to her, the encounter can become a durable customer relationship, with the buyer returning for goods she understands how to supply. Chichikov promises he will not forget her and asks whether she has an acquaintance or agent in town who could complete the serf transfers and the other necessary business. Korobotchka says that the son of the archpriest, Father Cyril, is a lawyer, pointing toward a practical means of carrying the paperwork forward.

Narrative Role and Significance

Korobotchka’s episode makes a bureaucratic absurdity legible through the ordinary habits of a landowner worried about work, harvests, and money. The peasants’ deaths have not ended her tax burden because they remain listed as living; Chichikov sees an opportunity in that mismatch, while she sees both a possible payment and the risk of selling too cheaply. The transaction’s comedy rests on the collision between his concealed purpose and her literal, cautious approach to a deal she has never encountered.

Her characterization remains sharply focused on thrift and uncertainty, yet the episode gives those traits material causes. She has suffered a bad harvest, remembers eighteen lost workers, and continues to bear charges for men who have died. Her refusal to accept instantly is therefore not mere incomprehension: within the limited information she has, waiting to compare prices seems prudent. At the same time, her final attention to future provisions shows how readily an unprecedented sale can be absorbed into the familiar routines of rural commerce. Korobotchka does not explain or challenge the system that makes the dead taxable; her actions expose its consequences by treating them as another household expense to be negotiated.