Chichikov’s conception of the dead-soul scheme is the decisive turn that converts his experience as an attorney into the enterprise organizing the novel. A legal commission concerning peasants from a ruined estate teaches him that deceased serfs remain on the revision rolls and can still be treated as living for fiscal and administrative purposes. He sees how that discrepancy might be turned into capital: acquire the names, claim to transfer the supposed settlers to Kherson, and apply for a loan. What begins as a commission about a failing estate becomes a plan for a fictitious population—and for the long road on which Chichikov will pursue it.

The Legal Commission and Its Opening

At this point in his life, Chichikov has suffered misfortune and taken up work as an ordinary attorney, a calling without civic standing that exposes him to discourtesy and little respect. One of his assignments is to place several hundred peasants from a ruined estate in the hands of the Public Trustee. The estate’s collapse has several causes: cattle disease, dishonest bailiffs, failed harvests, and epidemics that have killed its best workers. The owner’s extravagance has compounded these losses; after furnishing a Moscow house in the latest style and spending his money, he has been forced to mortgage what remains, peasants included.

The proposed mortgage to the Treasury is a novelty and is treated cautiously. Chichikov, acting as attorney, must first entertain the officials involved and explain that half the peasants are dead, so that their names will not prompt later claims against the estate. The matter brings him into direct contact with the machinery of the state: legal business requires the officials’ cooperation, while the records do not automatically reflect the deaths that have occurred.

The secretary’s response supplies the crucial administrative premise. The deceased peasants are still entered on the revision lists; in the secretary’s view, one soul dies and another will eventually be born to take its place. The exchange makes a fiscal abstraction newly useful to Chichikov. A name retained in the rolls can continue to function in official calculations even when the person behind it has died.

From Record to Speculative Capital

Chichikov recognizes the possibility in an abrupt moment of self-reproach at his own failure to see what is already available. His calculation is conditional on timing: he must buy deceased peasants before a new revision list is made. He imagines that the Council of Public Trust might pay two hundred roubles for each one, and that a sufficient number could yield a capital of two hundred thousand roubles. These figures belong to his projected scheme, not to money he has already obtained.

He judges the moment favorable because epidemics have caused many deaths, while the estates of financially troubled landowners are poorly managed. Some owners, he reasons, would prefer to relinquish their dead peasants rather than continue paying the poll-tax on them. Their immediate tax burden could thus become the source of his proposed acquisition. The plan depends on both sides of the same discrepancy: the dead remain taxable to their owners, but, once transferred on paper, might be presented by Chichikov as the basis for a loan.

The scheme is not a confusion about whether the peasants are alive. Chichikov knows they are dead and considers how to make the paperwork serve a false account of their status. Because purchasing or mortgaging peasants without land is illegal, he proposes to say that he is buying them for transfer elsewhere. The artifice would recast a purchase of dead names as a prospective settlement project.

A Fictitious Settlement in Kherson

Kherson provides the plan with a destination and an administrative cover. Chichikov has heard that land there can be acquired cheaply if the purchaser undertakes to colonize it. He therefore proposes to claim that he is transferring the peasants to Kherson, where they are to live as settlers, though he knows that the people he intends to transfer are already dead. The projected colony gives his paper transaction a plausible public purpose and connects it to a place where new settlement is supposedly possible.

He also thinks through the supporting documentation. If officials demand testimony to confirm the transfer, he proposes to produce a letter signed by the superintendent of the Kherson rural police. The apparent official witness would in fact be Chichikov himself. Even the settlement’s name is part of the invention: he considers calling the supposed village Chichikovoe, or Pavlovskoe after his Christian name. The false village, the self-signed confirmation, and the intended loan are related pieces of one design, not events that have already been completed.

The Plan Becomes the Novel’s Journey

After crossing himself in accordance with Russian custom, Chichikov sets out to put the enterprise into operation. He travels through different parts of the Russian Empire, particularly places afflicted by crop failure, high mortality, or other misfortunes likely to make dead souls available cheaply. His search is purposeful rather than random: he selects landowners whom he thinks he can deal with easily and tries first to establish acquaintance, preferably friendship. If a landowner can be persuaded to give him the names without payment, he can avoid even the purchase price.

The narrator identifies this idea as the scheme that brings the story into being: without it, the tale would not have been written. That claim makes the plan more than one item in Chichikov’s career. It supplies a repeatable objective that carries him from one landowner to another, linking episodic encounters through a single financial ambition. The narrator also presents the later course of the affair as involving success, failure, and increasingly difficult problems, so the scheme is a starting mechanism rather than a guaranteed path to wealth.

The planned journey gives the narrative its expanding frame. The party consists of Chichikov, his britchka, the valet Petrushka, the coachman Selifan, and three horses already known individually to the reader. The road remains ahead of them, and the narrator anticipates that the story’s scope will widen as they travel. The dead-soul scheme thus binds a technical loophole in revision-list taxation to the novel’s movement through estates and encounters: a fraud conceived from the mismatch between living people and official records becomes the engine of a journey across the country.