Purchase deeds

Purchase deeds are the documents through which Chichikov converts purchases of deceased peasants into apparently lawful transfers of living, taxable serfs. They are the practical hinge of his scheme: lists, signatures, powers of attorney, witnesses, fees, and official registration give a fictional transaction the force of administrative fact, while the paperwork also preserves the dead peasants’ names and traces of their former lives.

Purpose and Legal Fiction

Chichikov’s explanation to Manilov establishes the central contradiction. Because the peasants remain listed as living in the census returns, he proposes that the parties record them as living rather than dead. He presents this not as a departure from civil law but as obedience to the census status, insisting that an obligation is sacred and that he will not step outside the law. The deed’s wording thus exploits a distinction between the peasants’ actual deaths and their continuing legal presence on the rolls.

The arrangement has an economic consequence for the seller as well as the buyer. Chichikov tells Korobotchka that, after he takes over the peasants and their dues as bona fide serfs, he—not she—will pay the tax on them. She has recently paid an assessor to address the burden of dead peasants still treated as living, but the novelty of the proposed sale makes her suspect that the stranger may be cheating her. The purchase deed offers her relief from the tax obligation while transferring that liability, on paper, to Chichikov.

Preparation and the Lists of Names

The documents rely on lists that are anything but uniform. Korobotchka has never compiled a written register of her peasants and knows their names by heart, so Chichikov gives her a sheet of stamped paper, asks her to dictate, and writes down the names himself. The paper is suitable for serf indentures, he explains, not for the plea she expects to file in land court. Her dictated list includes such striking names as Peter Saveliev Neuvazhai Korito, Korovi Kirpitch, and Koleso Ivan. The formal deed therefore begins with a process that joins an official-looking material document to an improvised oral record.

Sobakevitch, by contrast, readily produces a detailed list while the parties settle their bargain. He records not only names but former occupations and qualities, and Chichikov and he agree to go into town the next day to arrange the deed’s signing. The difference between the sellers’ records becomes visible again when Chichikov later examines the completed papers. Korobotchka’s entries carry nicknames and additions; Plushkin’s are so concise that some consist only of a Christian name, patronymic, and a couple of dots; Sobakevitch’s give detailed accounts of the deceased peasants’ abilities and character, sometimes naming their parents as well.

Registration at the Municipal Offices

Chichikov chooses to prepare and fair-copy the necessary indentures himself rather than leave them with a lawyer, expecting to save time and expense. After writing the deeds, he gathers the papers and goes to the municipal offices to complete the transfer. He carries the purchase list and application, says that some vendors are present and that he holds powers of attorney from the others, and presses to finish the business that day. Ivan Antonovitch tells him that further proof is required to establish that no impediments exist; Chichikov invokes his close acquaintance with the council president, but that connection alone does not immediately settle the matter.

The president ultimately agrees to act as Plushkin’s attorney after reading his letter. Chichikov asks for the transfer to be completed at once because he intends to leave town the following day. The president orders the indentures completed that day, while also urging him to prolong his stay. Officials and witnesses assemble, append signatures with their various titles and styles of handwriting, and the papers are signed, docketed, and registered. The president’s intervention also reduces Chichikov’s government percentage and publication fees to half the usual amount; the other half is charged to another applicant. Personal connections and official discretion thus help determine the cost and speed of a transaction presented as routine legal business.

Paperwork, Identity, and the Novel’s Irony

Once registered, the deeds make the acquisition count in official terms, despite the fact that the peasants are dead. Chichikov wakes delighted at being the owner of nearly four hundred souls, then prepares the indentures himself and carries the papers under his arm to the offices. His haste reflects not only practical urgency but unease: the souls seem insubstantial to him, and he wants the burden of the documents off his shoulders. The papers are both the means of making his purchase real within the administrative system and a physical weight associated with an uncertain, fabricated possession.

The lists also interrupt the abstraction of ownership. As Chichikov reads them, he imagines the peasants’ varied working lives and feels that each register has a character of its own. Sobakevitch’s list preserves occupations such as joinery, comments on sobriety and diligence, and even family details; beside Thedotov’s name it records that his father was unknown, his mother the maidservant Kapitolina, and his morals and honesty good. The entries make the deceased seem to have lived only yesterday, and Chichikov addresses them in a moment of unexpected tenderness. The deed that treats them as transferable units also carries remnants of individual histories.

Elsewhere in the novel, the same dependence on paperwork exposes the limits of procedural form. At Koshkarev’s estate, a written plea is to pass through successive offices and committees before it can reach the administrator; when Chichikov explains that he wants souls who are, so to speak, dead, the written process twists his words into bureaucratic absurdity. The estate’s reply states that every soul is already pledged under a first mortgage and a second mortgage of 150 roubles per soul, with the village of Gurmailovka excepted because of a court caveat published in the Moscow Gazette. The contrast clarifies what makes Chichikov’s earlier deeds effective: registration can authorize a transfer only where the records and encumbrances allow it. Across these episodes, documents do not merely describe ownership; they create, obstruct, and expose the legal identities on which the dead-soul scheme depends.