In brief
A polite, unremarkable gentleman drives into the provincial town of N., charms every official he can find, and then sets off round the neighbouring estates with an odd request. Russian serfs were counted at periodic censuses, and their owners paid tax on each one until the next count, whether he had died in the meantime or not. Paul Ivanovitch Chichikov offers to buy the dead ones, on paper, while the state still believes they are breathing. Five landowners sell, each in his own deranged way. The town hears of it, loses its head trying to work out what it means, and Chichikov leaves in a hurry.
That is Part I, complete, and it is one of the funniest books in Russian. Part II survives in fragments, because Gogol burned it. In those fragments the comedy turns slowly into a sermon, and the sermon stops in the middle of a sentence. What remains is the unfinished work of a man who came to think his own gift a danger to his soul.
The argument
The title is the joke and the thesis. A “soul” was the legal word for a male serf, a unit of property, and also what the Church says you will answer for. Chichikov’s fraud runs on the first meaning. The book’s real business is with the second: the people who sell him their dead serfs have less life in them than the names on their lists. Alexander Herzen saw this at once, noting in his diary in 1842 that the dead souls are the landowners themselves.
The proof is Part I, ch. 7, the best thing in the book. Chichikov wakes up the owner of nearly four hundred souls, copies out his deeds, and finds that the lists have begun to speak. Korobotchka’s dead have nicknames. Sobakevitch’s have references: “excellent at joinery”, or “Father unknown, Mother the maidservant Kapitolina, Morals and Honesty good.” And the swindler, of all people, is moved: “My friends, what a concourse of you is here! How did you all pass your lives, my brethren?” He imagines Probka Stepan the carpenter, tramping the country with an axe in his belt, falling from a church cupola. For a few pages the only warm, moving, various Russians in the novel are dead peasants, seen by a crook, in a ledger. To Plushkin’s runaways, who are alive, he says: “Although you are still alive, what is the good of you? You are practically dead.”
The book is not an attack on serfdom, and readers who want one have to supply it. Nobody in it proposes that serfdom should end, and Gogol later defended it in print. What the novel shows is something colder, a world in which trading people by paper strikes no one as strange. Sobakevitch names the deal “much as though the conversation had been turning on grain” (Part I, ch. 5) and opens at “a hundred roubles per head” for men he knows to be under the ground. Korobotchka’s only worry is the market: “You see, never before have I sold dead souls” (Part I, ch. 3). The scheme itself comes from a clerk’s shrug: “Should one soul die, another will be born, and in time grow up to take the first one’s place” (Part I, ch. 11). Chichikov needs no violence, only an empire that believes its own paperwork, and a Council of Public Trust that “might pay me two hundred roubles apiece for them”.
The shape of the book
Part I is built as a tour and then a collapse. After the arrival come five visits, one to a chapter, and they run downhill. Manilov (ch. 2) is all sweetness and no substance, with an arbour inscribed “This is the Temple of Solitary Thought.” Korobotchka (ch. 3) is a suspicious widow who cannot tell a dead serf from a barrel of honey. Nozdrev (ch. 4) lies, gambles, offers to play chess for the souls and nearly has his guest beaten. Sobakevitch (ch. 5) sells hard and abuses everybody. Plushkin (ch. 6), the richest of them, starves among his rubbish with a toothpick unused since before the French came to Moscow. It is a descent from vacancy to ruin.
The story then reverses. Chichikov registers his purchases and is briefly the town’s millionaire. At the Governor’s ball Nozdrev bawls that “this man traffics in dead peasants” (ch. 8), and Korobotchka drives in to ask what dead souls are fetching. Two ladies then settle that the purchase is a blind and his “real object” is “TO ABDUCT THE GOVERNOR’S DAUGHTER” (ch. 9). The officials meet and consider whether he is a forger, a spy, the bandit Captain Kopeikin, or “Napoleon, escaped from St. Helena” (ch. 10). The Public Prosecutor goes home and dies of it. Only when Chichikov is on the road out does Gogol tell us who he is. The biography arrives last, in ch. 11.
Part II repeats the scheme with better people: an idle young landlord, a mad reforming colonel, a model farmer, a saintly tax-farmer, a just Prince. Chichikov is caught out over a forged will, Murazov urges him to repent, and the text gives out (pt II, ch. 4).
The voice
Gogol’s title page called the book a poem, and the claim is less odd than it looks. The narrator is the true main character, a garrulous, self-important and unreliable voice, who cannot describe an inn without noticing the billiard players on its sign. The opening sets the tone by refusing to give us a hero at all: “a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin.” Chapter 1 ends on a marital note the plot does not need. Sobakevitch tells his lanky wife that Chichikov is a very pleasant fellow, and “To this his spouse replied ‘Hm!’ and then dealt him a hearty kick in the ribs.”
The method is to see a person as an animal or a thing. Sobakevitch “exactly resembled a moderate-sized bear”, and walks on other people’s toes. Then, at the very end of Part I, the voice lifts off. Selifan cracks his whip, the britchka speeds up, and the narrator turns from the road to the nation: “And you, Russia of mine—are not you also speeding like a troika which nought can overtake?” The passage closes “Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes—only the weird sound of your collar-bells.”
Russian schoolchildren learn that as a hymn. Remember who is in the carriage: a swindler with a box of deeds to the dead, behind a coachman who, drunk, once tipped him into the mud (ch. 3). Whether Gogol meant the irony is open to question.
What this English leaves out
The free text linked here is the translation of 1916 with an introduction by John Cournos. Gutenberg credits it to D. J. Hogarth; the translator is usually identified as C. J. Hogarth. It is lively and readable, but it is not a complete rendering of what Gogol wrote.
The chapters here start where the action starts, and several of the book’s famous authorial passages are not in them. Chapter 6 in Russian opens with Gogol’s lament for the curiosity of his own youth, and here it opens on a village street. Chapter 7 in Russian opens with a meditation on two kinds of writer, the flatterer who is loved and the one who dares to show daily life and is scorned, and this is the source of the phrase about laughter through tears. Here it opens with Chichikov getting out of bed. Most of Plushkin’s past, the thrifty husband and father he once was, is gone too, and with it the chapter’s tragedy and its question of how a man gets from there to here. This English therefore gives a brisker, more comic Gogol than the Russian. For the full voice, use Pevear and Volokhonsky or Robert Maguire.
The people
Chichikov
Smooth, clean, medium in everything, and proud of his round chin. His sick father’s one legacy was a speech: “keep and save your every kopeck”, since “never will a KOPECK fail you” (ch. 11). He rises by toadying at school and on a building commission, becomes a customs officer of terrifying skill, joins the smugglers, falls, and rises again, always through the same patience. Gogol declines to call him a villain: “In these days our villains have ceased to exist. Rather it would be fairer to call him an ACQUIRER.” The horror and charm of him is that he is the only energetic person in the book, the only one with a plan, and that the plan leads nowhere but to more.
The five sellers
They have become Russian common nouns. Manilov is pleasant vacancy. Korobotchka, whose name suggests a little box, is the head of a small business that will never be persuaded of anything. Nozdrev is the bully who embraces you. Sobakevitch is brute acumen, and the only one to bargain as if he knows precisely what he is selling. Plushkin, so ragged that Chichikov first takes him for a housekeeper, is the owner of eight hundred souls who hoards scraps in a heap.
Selifan and Petrushka
Coachman and valet, the only companions Chichikov has. Selifan lectures his horses on morals. Petrushka reads for the pleasure of watching letters turn into words, and smells.
The dead
Probka Stepan, the giant carpenter; Milushkin, the stove-builder; Maksim Teliatnikov, of whom Sobakevitch boasts that “Anything that he drove his awl into became a pair of boots”. And Elizabeta Vorobei, slipped into Sobakevitch’s list with her name disguised, a fraud inside the fraud: “But that is a WOMAN’S name!” (ch. 7).
The good men of Part II
Kostanzhoglo, who makes a fortune by treating his land properly and has no patience for anyone else; Murazov, the rich old saint; the Prince. They are what Gogol promised his critics, and they are the book’s most lifeless inhabitants. The rogues and wrecks of Part II, like the ruined spendthrift Khlobuev, remain alive on the page, which tells you where his genius lay.
How it was made
Gogol was born in 1809 in Sorochintsy, in Ukraine, and got the plot from Pushkin, as he himself told it. He read him the first chapters; by Cournos’s account in the introduction here, the poet grew gloomier as he listened and finally cried: “God! What a sad country Russia is!” Most of Part I was written abroad, largely in Rome, where Gogol lived from the late 1830s. Hence the ending’s “from my beautiful home in a strange land I can still see you”.
The censors were a comedy of their own. In Moscow they objected to the title on the ground that a soul is immortal. The book came out in 1842 only as The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, with the tale of Captain Kopeikin, the crippled veteran turned away by St Petersburg officials, rewritten to get it through.
Gogol had meant three parts, and readers have often compared the plan to Dante, with Part I as the inferno and Chichikov redeemed at the end. In the 1846 edition he added a preface begging readers to send in corrections, whatever their station: “I beg of you, my reader, to act also as my corrector” (preface). In 1847 he published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, a defence of autocracy, serfdom and the Church, and lost his liberal admirers at a stroke. Under a stern confessor, Father Matvei Konstantinovsky, he fasted and sank into despair. In February 1852 he burned his manuscripts, including the new Part II, then told friends the Devil had tricked him, took to his bed, refused food and died nine days later. What we have is an earlier draft rescued from his papers. It ends on the Prince’s appeal against corruption: “before us the future looms dark, and that we can scarcely....” The editor’s note follows: “Here the manuscript of the original comes abruptly to an end.”
Readers and critics
Slavophiles took Part I for a slander. Vissarion Belinsky welcomed it as the truth about Russia and made Gogol the founder of a Russian realism, a reading that lasted well over a century. When Selected Passages appeared Belinsky answered with his furious open letter of 1847, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s death sentence of 1849, commuted at the last moment, came partly for reading that letter aloud.
The modern reaction began with the Symbolists and formalists. Andrei Bely studied Gogol’s prose as a verbal machine, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol (1944) threw out the social reading altogether. For Nabokov the plot hardly counts, Chichikov is a salesman sent from hell, and the subject is poshlost, a self-satisfied vulgarity with no good English word. Both camps have a point: the book is about a particular Russia of forms, bribes and serfs, and no reform would touch the void it finds in Manilov.
Afterlives
The first English version is a curiosity: Home Life in Russia (London, 1854), doctored and passed off as the work of “a Russian noble”, and the only other version on Project Gutenberg. Serious translation begins with Hogarth and Constance Garnett; Nabokov preferred Bernard Guerney’s of 1942.
Serfdom ended in 1861 and took the plot’s legal premise with it, but the types survived. On the stage Mikhail Bulgakov adapted the novel for Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1932. Rodion Shchedrin made it an opera, composed in 1976 and premiered the next year. Mikhail Schweitzer’s television serial of 1984 followed, and Alex Cox turned it into a Western in 2025.
How to read it
- Stop at the end of Part I, once. It ends on its greatest page. Read Part II as a document of what happened to Gogol.
- Read the narrator, not the plot. The pleasure is in the asides, and how long a sentence can stay off the point.
- Read ch. 7 slowly. Watch the switch from fraud to elegy, then the switch back, as Chichikov goes to the office and finds that “This is NOT the desk for serf affairs.”
- Keep the spellings loose. Hogarth’s Korobotchka, Nozdrev and Sobakevitch appear elsewhere as Korobochka, Nozdryov and Sobakevich.
Read next
- Nikolai Gogol, The Government Inspector (1836). The same town, the same panic over a stranger, also from a plot given by Pushkin.
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605–15). The road, the master and servant, the book that interrupts itself.
- Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (1859). What it would take to make a whole novel of Manilov’s sofa.
- Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlyov Family (1880). Plushkin’s rotting estate, with the laughter gone.
- Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, The Twelve Chairs (1928). Chichikov’s heir, loose in Soviet Russia.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (1944). A brilliant, unfair and essential short book on him.