5 Questions about Dead Souls

Among the poem’s characters, Chichikov’s “enterprise, or, to express it even more, so to speak, negotsiatsiya (business/deal),” caused complete bewilderment bordering on panic: both as an illegal, dangerous, and incomprehensible act, and as an unprecedented formula that could mean anything and certainly hid some sort of threat. What was Chichikov planning to do, and how is it presented in the novel?

1. Who is Chichikov Buying?

“I intend to acquire dead [souls] that, however, are listed as living on the revision lists,” Chichikov explains to Manilov. This explanation is not very satisfactory, neither for Chichikov’s interlocutor nor for the modern reader. What is a “revision”?

A revision was a census of peasants subject to taxation. In 1724, Peter the Great carried out a reform, replacing the household tax with the poll tax. Behind this historical event is a plot in the spirit of Chichikov—about repeated attempts to deceive the law within the framework of legality.

The essence of the household tax, which existed in Russia since 1678, was that the unit of taxation was the household—a separate, fenced peasant economy, regardless of the number of people living there. Against the background of continuously rising taxes during the Northern War, many peasants abandoned their farms and fled. However, it was found that the reduction in the number of households was accompanied by an increase in their population; that is, several families were presented as one “household” during the census and taxed accordingly.

The household census conducted in 1710 recorded a 20% reduction in the number of households compared to the previous census of 1678. Peter’s reform aimed to introduce a more reliable unit of taxation—a “male soul” regardless of age. In late 1718, Peter I issued a decree on conducting a poll census, immediately accompanying it with terrible threats: confiscation of peasants concealed from the census, and the death penalty for the elders responsible for concealment.

The responsibility for submitting the lists of peasants (skazki) was entrusted to their owners, elders, managers, and elected peasants. The threats were not very helpful, and although the skazki were submitted during 1719, numerous cases of people being hidden from the census were soon discovered.

From 1722 until 1724, the census results were verified to clarify the “poll number.” This difficult task was entrusted to special military auditors selected by the Senate and Peter himself. All this allowed the number of revision souls to be increased from 3.8 million (according to the 1721 census) to 5.5 million. This was the first revision of the tax-paying population. A revision soul could only be crossed off the revision list during the next revision, and until then, it was taxed regardless of what had actually happened to the person himself.

2. What is the Benefit of the Dead?

All of the above is a source of inconvenience for the owners of “dead souls” and the formal basis for Chichikov’s acquisition of them. What benefit should they bring? Chichikov’s idea was to mortgage the revision souls he had purchased to the Board of Trustees (Opekunsky Sovet). How did he intend to do this?

The history of state loans to the nobility was still relatively short at the time the novel is set. It began in 1754 with the creation of the St. Petersburg and Moscow Nobility Banks to issue low-interest loans to the nobility, who were becoming impoverished and mortgaging their estates.

Why the Board of Trustees? Originally, the Board of Trustees was created in 1763 to manage the Foundling Home in Moscow (and later in St. Petersburg)—a charitable institution for orphans and foundlings. A significant part of the Foundling Home’s initial budget consisted of donations. Its history as a loan-giving organization began when Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Repnin asked the Board for a loan of 50,000 rubles against the security of his estate in 1771. This request was granted, analogous requests followed, and soon this practice was legalized by the manifesto of 1772: Loan and Savings Treasuries were organized at the Boards of Trustees in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They issued loans against the security of estates, houses, and valuables, and also accepted deposits. Over time, this became the main source of income for the Foundling Homes and an excellent supplement to the Nobility Banks, whose funds were not endless, while the need for loans was very great.

3. Why Does Chichikov Resettle the Dead Souls to the Kherson Governorate?

Chichikov buys peasants without land, “for removal” (na vyvod), with the intention of resettling them elsewhere. Strictly speaking, he has nowhere to resettle them, as Chichikov does not own an estate, but one is very necessary because it is the estate that is mortgaged (the number of revision souls only determines the loan amount). However, Chichikov’s plan provides for this: he intends to resettle the muzhiks in the Kherson Governorate.

This territory, called New Russia (Novorossiya), became part of Russia in the mid-18th century after wars with Turkey and consisted of practically unpopulated steppes. Therefore, the government strongly encouraged those who were willing to occupy and cultivate them. The distribution of lands to private owners began in Novorossiya in 1764. The colonization was so difficult that, despite the enormous amount of land distributed at the end of the 18th century, the active resettlement of state peasants, and the encouragement of foreign colonists, by 1837, there were still free state lands in the Kherson Governorate and other territories.

Here we encounter chronological inconsistencies in Gogol’s work, which often contradict each other, creating that alarming, very characteristic effect where the detailed, seemingly very concrete reality begins to blur before the reader’s eyes, disintegrating into pieces that cannot be assembled into a stable, coherent picture.

For instance, the narrator explicitly characterizes the time of action as “soon after the glorious expulsion of the French,” which suggests the 1810s. But the poem repeatedly mentions a gendarme officer, and the special corps of gendarmes was formed in 1827. When concluding deals, it is mentioned that the “deeds were registered, marked, entered into the book and wherever appropriate, with the acceptance of half-percent fees and for printing in the Gazettes,” and the Gubernskie Vedomosti (Provincial Gazettes) were published in Russia since 1838. The mention of a recent mass epidemic clearly refers to the cholera epidemic of 1831.

4. Did Such Schemes Exist in Reality?

Moscow censors, according to Gogol’s letter to Pletnev of January 7, 1842, feared that “others will take example and buy dead souls.” There is no information about whether anyone dared to repeat Chichikov’s phantasmagorical scheme, but it is known that Gogol’s text became an impetus for searching for a prototypical plot for Chichikov’s scheme.

Stories about schemes involving revision souls, potentially known to Gogol (or Pushkin as the possible donor of the plot), began to be perceived as direct sources of the Dead Souls plot. A good example is Gilyarovsky’s story about his uncle, the landowner Pivinsky:

“Suddenly… officials began to travel around and collect information about everyone who had distilleries. There was talk that anyone who did not have fifty souls of peasants did not have the right to distill wine. <…> And he [Pivinsky] went to Poltava, and paid the poll tax for his deceased peasants as if for living ones… And since his own, even with the dead, were far from fifty, he collected a cart of horilka (vodka), and went around to his neighbors and bought dead souls from them for this horilka, registered them to himself, and, having become the paper owner of fifty souls, distilled wine until his death and gave Gogol, who used to visit Fedunki, the theme. Besides, all Mirgorod knew about Pivinsky’s dead souls.”

In general, there is nothing unusual about such a reader reaction, but in this case, the temptation to find direct sources of the plot (as well as, for example, to find the exact chronology) paradoxically plays into Gogol’s poetics, sharpening the contradiction between plausibility and absurdity, on the constant combination of which it is built.

5. What is Wrong with the Title?

The phrase “dead souls” caused panic not only among the characters in Gogol’s poem. The discussion of Gogol’s novel in the Moscow Censorship Committee very much resembled the discussion of Chichikov’s scheme directly in the novel:

“…The accusations, all without exception, were a comedy to the highest degree. As soon as Golokhvastov, who held the position of president, heard the title Dead Souls, he cried out in the voice of an ancient Roman: ‘No, I will never allow this: the soul is immortal; there can be no dead soul, the author is arming himself against immortality.’ The clever president was finally able to grasp that the matter concerned revision souls. As soon as he grasped it, and the other censors grasped it with him, that ‘dead’ means ‘revision souls,’ an even greater uproar ensued.”

This similarity is not surprising, as the details of the discussion in the censorship committee are known to us from the very same letter from Gogol to Pletnev. But this is not the only case when the phrase “dead souls” was read by contemporaries as a dangerous absurdity. A prime example is the letter from Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin to Gogol, where we read the following: “There are no dead souls in the Russian language. There are revision souls, inscribed, lost, gained.“

If Gogol’s metaphor has long become familiar to the modern reader, to Pogodin it seemed strange and inappropriate. Let us pay attention to the “lost souls” (ubylye dushi) mentioned in this list—this is precisely the conventional designation for the subject of Chichikov’s “negotsiatsiya.”

Thus, on the one hand, a legally precise formula exists (and is never mentioned in Gogol’s text), and on the other hand, the metaphor of the soul’s mortification, which replaces this formula in the text, was not something completely unusual for that time. It is found both in the lyrical poetry of that time and in religious texts well known to Gogol. For example: “Although the human soul is justly recognized as immortal, a kind of death exists for it as well. <…> But the death of the soul occurs when God leaves it…” writes Saint Augustine in The City of God. A similar interpretation is seen in Gregory Palamas’s collection Philokalia, which Gogol carefully read: “Know… that the soul also has death, although it is immortal by nature. <…> …The separation of God from the soul is the death of the soul.”

Thus, Gogol combines a metaphor that was generally familiar to his contemporaries with a reality that was just as familiar, but it is precisely this combination that creates the stylistic and semantic break that made the title so disturbing, incomprehensible, and provocative.

Sources

Anisimov E. V. The Tax Reform of Peter I. Leningrad, 1982.

Besprozvanny V., Permyakov E. From the Commentaries to the First Volume of “Dead Souls”. Tartu Notebooks. Moscow, 2005.

Bugrov A. State Banks in Russia: 1754–1860. Moscow, 2017.

Goncharov S. A. Gogol’s Work in a Religious and Mystical Context. St. Petersburg, 1997.

Kabuzan V. M. The Settlement of Novorossiya (Ekaterinoslav and Kherson Provinces) in the XVIII — First Half of the XIX Century (1719–1858). Moscow, 1976.

Smirnova-Chikina E. S. Gogol’s Poem “Dead Souls”. Literary Commentary. Leningrad, 1964.