«Dead Souls», Nikolai GogolBuy at two-fifty, pawn at two hundred

The business plan in one sentence

Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov arrives in the provincial town of NN, calls on every official from the governor down to the inspector of the medical board, and then drives round the landowners with one question: how many of your serfs have died since the last census? And he asks to buy the dead ones.

There is nothing mystical about it. By law a dead serf counts as alive until the next census, and his owner pays the poll tax on him. Korobochka complains: “The folk are dead, but you pay for them as if they were alive”. Chichikov offers to take that burden off their hands and pays kopecks for it.

Why he wants them, Gogol explains only in the last chapter, the eleventh, with 86% of the text behind us. The idea came to Chichikov while he was mortgaging someone else’s estate where half the serfs had died, and a clerk told him not to worry: they still counted in the census. So one could buy the dead and pawn them as the living: a thousand souls, two hundred roubles each from the Board of Guardians, the state’s lender, and two hundred thousand in capital.

Five visits, four deals

Chapters two to six are five visits, and each landowner sells the dead in his own way. Manilov gives them away: “I hand them over to you free of interest, and I’ll take the deed on myself”. Korobochka lets eighteen souls go for fifteen paper roubles and is long afraid of being cheated: she sold her honey at twelve roubles a pood, and who knows what these are worth. Nozdryov offers them thrown in with a stallion, then swaps them for the carriage, then plays draughts for them, and it all ends in a row.

Sobakevich starts at a hundred roubles apiece and praises his dead like live goods: Mikheyev the coachbuilder, Stepan Probka the carpenter, Milushkin the bricklayer. They settle on two and a half. Plyushkin hands over a hundred and twenty dead for nothing, Chichikov taking on their taxes, plus seventy-eight runaways at thirty-two kopecks. Chichikov works out twenty-four roubles ninety-six kopecks in a second, and Gogol remarks: “He was strong at arithmetic”.

Gogol has no need to describe his characters: you see a man by how he sells what doesn’t exist. The dreamer gives it away, the widow fears selling too cheap, the liar swaps and lies, the tight fist haggles to the end, the miser is glad of kopecks.

What dead souls are going for

The first to blab is Nozdryov. At the governor’s ball he shouts at the top of his voice that Chichikov “trades in dead souls”. Nobody believes him: everyone in town knows Nozdryov is an arrant liar.

Then Korobochka comes to town. She has not slept for three nights and has decided to find out what dead souls are going for: what if she sold too cheap? Through the archpriest’s wife the story reaches the ladies, and one of them says: “This is the second time I’ve heard about these dead souls”. The second time, the town believes it.

The scheme rested on nobody wanting the dead. Chichikov beat Sobakevich down from a hundred to two and a half, and was undone by fifteen roubles: by an old woman who wanted to know the market price.

Napoleon, Kopeikin and the governor’s daughter

For the next two chapters the town guesses why the newcomer wants dead souls. In chapter nine the word “dead” occurs 33 times in the Russian original, almost half of its 68 in the whole book. The ladies decide the souls are a cover and that he means to carry off the governor’s daughter. The officials recall a paper about a forger of banknotes.

The postmaster tells a whole tale about Captain Kopeikin until the police chief points out that Kopeikin had lost an arm and a leg, while Chichikov has both. Then someone suggests that Chichikov is Napoleon in disguise. And the prosecutor thinks and thinks, and dies.

Nobody hits on the right answer, the dull arithmetic of the Board of Guardians. The town that fears dead souls shows few signs of life itself: the prosecutor’s soul was only discovered after his death.

Who is dead here

When Chichikov reminds Sobakevich that he is praising the dead, Sobakevich agrees and at once adds about the living: “flies, not people”.

In chapter seven Chichikov sits down over the lists himself, and the dead come alive. Stepan Probka the carpenter, “of exemplary sobriety”, who perhaps slipped off a church dome. Maxim Telyatnikov the shoemaker, who learned his trade from a German. Sobakevich’s list is so thorough that “it seemed as if the peasants had been alive only yesterday”.

Meanwhile the living in this book dream of a stone bridge with shops across the pond, let their hay rot and their flour turn to stone in the cellars, and learn they had a soul after they die. School explains it in one line: the dead souls are the landowners. The book does it more subtly: the dead men on the lists get more life than the living.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the school line that the landowners are the dead souls, but for the way Gogol builds a comedy on bookkeeping: five hagglings, one rumour and a receipt that shows everyone up. And for the last page, where Chichikov’s carriage becomes a troika and the troika becomes Russia: “Russia, where are you flying to, give me an answer? She gives no answer.”

One point off for showing the business plan on the last slide: investors don’t wait that long. Readers, luckily, are more patient.