Serfdom

Serfdom in Dead Souls is a system of labor, taxation, and legal registration that makes people countable as property long after death. Because a landowner’s obligations and borrowing power depend on the names recorded in official rolls, the system creates the very gap Paul Ivanovitch Chichikov exploits: a dead person can remain economically useful as a taxable entry or as collateral. The same order also governs daily work on estates, where attempts to alter obligations expose the distance between a proprietor’s authority and the peasants’ experience.

Census, Tax, and the Paper Life of the Dead

A periodic census recorded serfs as “souls,” and the intervals between revisions could last ten or twenty years. Owners paid tax on everyone listed at the last census, including those who had since died. Yet the continued registration was not only a burden: landowners could borrow against dead souls as well as living ones. Official status therefore outlasted a person’s life and gave a name continuing fiscal and financial force.

This mechanism gives Chichikov’s plan its practical basis. He proposes buying deceased serfs at reduced prices, relieving their owners of the continuing tax while assembling a fictitious population that he can mortgage. The intended proceeds would finance an estate and living serfs, turning entries on a revision list into the starting capital for a fortune. His scheme is not an escape from the system but an opportunistic use of its categories: the people disappear, while the state’s paperwork continues to count them.

The plan also grows out of Chichikov’s work as an attorney. While arranging a mortgage to the Treasury for the peasants of a ruined estate, he has to explain that half the listed people are dead. A secretary treats their continued presence on the revision lists as unremarkable, observing that one soul will eventually be replaced by another born and grown to take its place. Chichikov recognizes the implication: between revisions, a dead serf can still be presented as an asset. He reasons that he can pose as a buyer relocating peasants to Taurida or Kherson, where land is available cheaply on the promise of settlement, and make the transfer appear formally lawful. His imagined proof of settlement is a letter from the Kherson rural police superintendent, a position he plans to claim for himself; he even imagines naming the village Chichikovoe or Pavlovskoe.

Transfer, Valuation, and Official Procedure

The novel makes the abstraction of the census concrete through purchases and documents. In dealing with Manilov, Chichikov reaches the question of price, but Manilov offers the souls unconditionally and says he will cover the expenses of sale. The exchange shows how the same officially consequential persons can be treated as a matter of generosity between proprietors, even as the larger system assigns them monetary value and tax liability.

Other records are more exacting. Sobakevitch’s list gives each serf’s trade, age, and pedigree, with marginal notes on conduct and sobriety. The detail resembles an inventory of individual traits, but it serves a sale in which the people are transferred as entries. At the municipal offices, Chichikov asks where serf-indenture business is handled, presents his purchase list, and requests registration of peasants bought from local landowners. Some vendors are present; for the others, he has powers of attorney. The official says the transaction cannot be completed that day without further proof that no impediments exist.

The registration process combines formal requirements with personal influence and discretionary costs. Chichikov invokes his intimacy with the Council President, but the official indicates that one connection will not suffice. After witnesses arrive and the indentures are signed, docketed, and registered, the government percentage and publication fees are reduced: the President has ordered that Chichikov pay only half the usual charges, with the remainder assigned somehow to another applicant. The resulting transaction is legally recorded, but its cost reflects favoritism as well as procedure. The institution that certifies ownership also permits relationships to shape the price of certification.

A later attempt to obtain souls through an estate office turns the same administrative logic into an absurd chain of referrals. Colonel Koshkarev instructs Chichikov to submit a written statement to the Office for the Reception of Reports and Returns; it would then pass through further offices and committees before reaching an administrator and secretary. When Chichikov explains directly that he wants souls that are “so to speak, dead,” the Colonel directs him to put that wording in the statement. The procedure can accept the phrase as paperwork without resolving the contradiction it names.

Labor, Estate Management, and Unequal Obligations

Serfdom is also a daily labor regime. The barshchina is the forced work owed by a serf to a proprietor, measured in hours or days each week. At Tientietnikov’s estate, he reduces this obligation and the number of days worked for the owner, intending to increase the peasants’ leisure. He dismisses the bailiff and personally supervises work in the fields, at the threshing-floor and kilns, and in the movement of barges and rafts. His reforms alter the terms of labor, but his energy does not give him practical knowledge of how to manage it; the peasants recognize that he speaks from books rather than experience, and the two sides fail to work in concert.

The unequal results become visible in the crops. Work on the manorial fields appears diligent, and Tientietnikov rewards it with vodka, yet the peasants’ rye, oats, and millet develop ahead of the proprietor’s crops. When challenged, the peasants attribute the poor harvest to grubs and lack of rain. Tientietnikov notices that the peasants’ crops have escaped the supposed damage and that rain has fallen selectively. His concessions and supervision do not eliminate the imbalance or the mistrust built into the relationship between owner and workers.

His efforts to reduce women’s work meet a different set of difficulties. He abolishes most of their linen, hedge-fruit, mushroom, and nut tithes and halves other tasks, hoping the free time will support household sewing, mending, clothing, and kitchen gardens. Instead, complaints and domestic disputes continue, and husbands ask him to intervene in conflicts with their wives. When he later tries severity, he finds that authority alone cannot resolve the disputes or make his earlier plan succeed. The episodes present estate reform not as a simple adjustment of hours and dues, but as an encounter with relationships and circumstances that the proprietor’s administrative measures do not command.

Tientietnikov also plans a school and tries to settle disputes, but his professors’ legal subtleties prove ineffective when each party lies and no clear judgment follows. He comes to see that book learning and philosophical maxims have not supplied the knowledge of people he needs. The broader failure is mutual: proprietor and peasants do not understand one another, and both become dissatisfied. His waning attention to the fields follows from this impasse, linking the practical failure of reform to the limits of authority exercised without reciprocal understanding.

Mortality, Debt, and the System’s Afterlife

The consequences of serfdom’s accounting rules remain visible in later transactions. When Chichikov bargains with Khlobuev over a distressed estate, Khlobuev says that only fifty of the hundred souls on the last revision survive after cholera, and that some of the survivors have absconded. He says these fugitives must also be reckoned as dead, since pursuing them legally could result in the whole property passing to the authorities. He asks thirty-five thousand roubles for the estate; Chichikov immediately counters with twenty-five thousand. Death and flight thus enter the valuation of land through the estate’s registered population and its liabilities.

Across these episodes, serfdom binds labor to ownership while translating lives into entries that can be taxed, transferred, mortgaged, or priced. The dead remain legible to the state; the living are measured through work and dues; and administrative records give both conditions economic consequences. Chichikov’s fraud depends on this structure, while the stalled reforms at Tientietnikov’s estate reveal its social cost. The system’s central contradiction is that people are treated as both human workers and countable assets, with paperwork able to preserve the latter status when life itself has ended.