Semen Semenovich Khlobuev

Semen Semenovich Khlobuev is a financially ruined landowner whose estate becomes both the object of a transaction with Chichikov and a measure of the human cost of his disordered circumstances. The seller’s poverty is visible in his worn clothes and neglected property; later, after an inheritance has been swallowed by debt, Murazov offers him not a windfall but a demanding public task. Khlobuev’s story thus turns on the difference between money briefly received and responsibility that might give his life a steadier direction.

Identity and Circumstances

When Chichikov arrives with Platon and Constantine to discuss buying Khlobuev’s estate, the property itself announces its decline. The visitors travel first through forest and cultivated land belonging to Platon and his brother-in-law; beyond their boundary, the forest gives way to swamp and the tillage to waste. Khlobuev’s village has a deserted air, and its owner has only just risen from bed. At about forty, he appears in a crooked cravat and stained frockcoat, with one boot worn through. The details make deprivation visible before he explains it: he is not merely selling land, but trying to manage a life whose material foundations have deteriorated.

Khlobuev is nevertheless delighted to receive visitors. He says that people generally avoid him because they expect him to ask for a loan, and admits that this reputation is his own fault. His rueful remark that swine cheat swine casts his predicament in the language of mutual failure rather than presenting him as an innocent victim. Even the holes in his boots become part of his welcome: he apologizes for his appearance and explains that he cannot afford to have them repaired. Hospitality survives, but it is framed by the poverty that makes ordinary obligations difficult.

The Estate Sale

Constantine introduces Chichikov as a possible purchaser, and Khlobuev greets him warmly. Chichikov, however, judges the estate to be in worse condition than he had expected and asks Khlobuev to name the lowest possible price. Khlobuev agrees that the property is in a terrible state and supplies a concrete account of its losses: of the hundred people recorded at the last revision, only fifty remain alive after cholera. Some of those still living have absconded; Khlobuev says they must be reckoned as dead, since legal proceedings against them could leave the entire property in the hands of the authorities. On this account, he asks thirty-five thousand roubles. Chichikov begins to haggle.

The negotiation is more than an exchange over land. The estate’s ruined fields and deserted village are joined to the depleted population recorded in the revision list, while Khlobuev’s financial need gives Chichikov room to bargain. Platon offers to lend Chichikov the additional five thousand roubles. Chichikov’s surprise at learning that Platon also lends money makes the assistance itself a small reversal: the purchase depends not only on the buyer’s resources, but on a loan from his companion.

When the dispatch-box is brought from the carriage, Khlobuev receives ten thousand roubles, and Chichikov promises that the remaining five thousand will arrive the next day. That promise comes only after Chichikov proposes paying three thousand on the agreed date and delaying the balance for two or three days, or longer. The narrator explicitly connects the bargaining over payment to Chichikov’s reluctance to part with money: even when another person is in urgent need, he prefers to pay tomorrow rather than today. The scene therefore places Khlobuev’s immediate vulnerability beside the buyer’s calculated postponement; what is a short delay to one man may matter greatly to the petitioner waiting for it.

Debts and the Inheritance

Later, Murazov asks Khlobuev to explain the state of his affairs and whether his aunt left him anything. Khlobuev answers that it is hard to say whether matters have improved. He received fifty people and thirty thousand roubles from Madame Khanasarova, but had to spend them satisfying his debts, leaving him destitute again. The inheritance changes his circumstances on paper and then disappears into obligations already accumulated. His account also raises a charge of trickery connected with the legacy, and he begins to name Chichikov before Murazov asks him first to explain his own situation and what amount would be enough to clear his difficulties.

This later disclosure complicates the earlier estate sale without erasing the terms of that transaction. Khlobuev has had access to money and property, yet neither has secured lasting stability: the proceeds from his aunt’s bequest went to creditors, while the sale of his estate arose from a setting of visible decay and urgent need. His repeated destitution is not presented as a single reversal but as a condition in which each apparent resource is already claimed by debt.

Murazov’s Counsel and a Possible Direction

Khlobuev remains silent as Murazov takes both his hands. Murazov tells him of a recluse in a monastery who never looks upon another human face and breaks his silence only to give advice. When Murazov visited him about a friend in profound distress, the recluse answered that God’s work must come first and one’s own last, and that money had to be collected for a church that lacked the means to be built. Murazov first took the response as a refusal of counsel. He then went to the Archimandrite, who independently asked whether Murazov could recommend a trustworthy man to collect church alms—a member of the dvoriane or the more educated merchants who would guard the entrusted money as carefully as the salvation of his soul.

Murazov thinks Khlobuev might be suited to that charge. He imagines him carrying a ledger from landowner to peasant and from peasant to townsman, learning where people live and who needs help. The work would not simply provide an occupation: by bringing him into sustained contact with the countryside and its needs, it could make him more useful to others and more widely sought after than a person who remained among city-dwellers. The proposal answers the disorder of Khlobuev’s former life with a practical routine of travel, accounting, and service, though the passage presents it as a possibility rather than confirming that he has accepted it.

Murazov adds that the Governor-General has recently said he would pay a great sum for a secretary who knows his work not merely from books but through experience. This prospect extends the same idea of usefulness into government service: practical knowledge is valued where book learning alone produces confusion. For Khlobuev, the church collection and the possible secretarial work are not reported as completed outcomes; they are openings Murazov identifies. His trajectory therefore ends at a moment of proposed redirection, with his debts still part of the story but a path toward disciplined work newly placed before him.