On Dead Souls: Мертвые души
ПРАВДОПОДОБИЕ
THE
SWINDLE: COULD IT WORK? THE TIME FRAME, VERISIMILITUDE
Gogol waits until the final Ch. 11—which is a sort of coda
chapter, added on after the basic action of the book is over—to explain how
Chichikov’s swindle works. At a low point in his life, after Chichikov’s
machinations as a customs official are discovered, he barely escapes going to
prison. After that he lands a job as a lowly legal agent, “arranging for the
mortgage of several hundred peasants to the Trustee Council.” Here he discovers
that such a process involves winning over a number of bureaucratic officials:
“a bottle of Madeira, at least, must be poured down each throat concerned.”
At this point, for the first time it dawns on Chichikov that dead
peasants may have value. Since they remain on the tax rolls until the next
census they are, in one sense, still alive. Landowners, opines Chichikov “will
be only too glad to let me have their dead souls, if only to save them paying
the serf-tax on them . . . True enough, one can neither buy nor mortgage
peasants without owning land. But then I’ll buy them for resettlement, that’s
it! Nowadays tracts of land are given away, free and for the asking, in the
provinces of Tauris and Kherson, just as long as you settle serfs there. So
that’s exactly where I’ll resettle all my dead souls! Off with them to the
province of Kherson; let them live there!”
The way the plot of DS goes, Chichikov’s idea is treated as
totally novel; no one else has thought of it, and that’s why the town officials
of N and the local landowners are so stupefied when they hear about Chichikov’s
purchases. The story of how DS began is that Pushkin gave the idea for
the plot about buying dead souls to Gogol. But in her handbook to the novel (p.
188-89) Smirnova-Chikina provides examples proving that speculators had engaged
in buying dead souls long before the idea dawned on Pushkin, or Gogol, or
Chichikov.
Furthermore, in his introduction to the Pevear/Volokhonsky English
translation of DS, Richard Pevear quotes a distant relation of Gogol,
Maria Grigorievna Anisimo-Yanovskaja, who links the idea of purchasing dead
souls to distilling vodka in the Ukraine.
“The thought of writing DS was taken by Gogol from my uncle
Pivinsky. Pivinsky had a small estate, some thirty peasant souls (that is,
adult male serfs), and five children. Life could not be rich, and so the
Pivinskys lived by distilling vodka. Many landowners at that time had
distilleries, there were no licenses. Suddenly officials started going around
gathering information about everyone who had a distillery. The rumor spread
that anyone with less than fifty souls had no right to distill vodka. The small
landowners fell to thinking; without distilleries they might as well die. But
Kharlampy Petrovich Pivinsky slapped himself on the forehead and said: ‘Aha!
Never thought of it before!’ He went to Poltava and paid the quitrent for his
dead peasants as if they were alive. And since even with the dead ones he was
still far short of fifty, he filled his britzka with vodka, went around to his
neighbors, exchanged the vodka for their dead souls, wrote them down in his own
name, and, having become the owner of fifty souls on paper, went on distilling
vodka till his dying day, and so he gave the subject to Gogol, who used to
visit Fedunky, Pivinsky’s estate, which was about ten miles from Yanovshchina
(the Gogol estate); anyway, the whole Mirgorod district knew about Pivinsky’s
dead souls.”
Pevear gives the source for this tale as Veresaev’s book Gogol
v zhizni. If it’s true we have one more origin story for the plot of DS. The
tale strikes me, however, as apocryphal, more than dubious; the very tone of it
resembles some bizarre skaz fiction invented by Gogol himself, or by
someone imitating his style. The Gogol estate, by the way, was called Vasilevka,
not Yanovshchina. At any rate, Smirnova-Chikina has established that there were
people out there speculating in dead souls well before Chichikov came along.
Smirnova-Chikina (p. 190-92) has also made an attempt to establish
the exact time frame of the novel. She mentions Chichikov’s participation (in
Ch. 11) on a commission for building a large-scale government edifice; in an
earlier variant of DS it is called “a commission for constructing a
temple of God.” This fictional commission, so says Chikina, has a prototype in
Russian history: the notorious scandal involving the construction of the temple
of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. After revelations of bribe-taking and
siphoning off of cash by members of the commission, it was abolished on Apr.
16, 1827, and its members were brought to justice. The amount of money stolen
came to 580,000 rubles. The case, which dragged on for ten years, ended with
conviction of the defendants, who had their property and homes confiscated. Placing
Chichikov as a member of that commission, Smirnova-Chikina assumes that he had
his property confiscated in 1827, somehow escaping jail. He moved on to a job
in customs on the Polish border in 1828 or 1829.
She goes on to assert that Chichikov would have worked as a
customs official for about two years (1829-1831), after which he took a job briefly
as a legal agent (a kind of paralegal) in Moscow, at which time the idea of
buying dead souls dawned on him. At one point Chichikov mentions that it’s a
good time to buy dead souls, in light of the recent epidemic. This alludes,
possibly, to the cholera epidemic that swept over all of Russia in 1831.
Several facts relevant to this time frame make Chichikov’s scheme
rather iffy, or at least would limit its scope severely. Before 1833 male
peasants—the only “souls” who had legal value—could be sold without land and
separated from their families. But in 1833 a law was passed that forbade the
sale of peasants while separating them from their families. We recall that in
DS Chichikov buys only male serfs, i.e., those who are on the tax rolls
(females and children are not taxed). Even more importantly, in 1833 there was
a new census—the first since 1815—at which time landowners could delete from
the tax rolls peasants who had died. Had he arrived in the town of N only a
year or two later there would have been no dead souls for Chichikov to purchase.
Given those facts—especially the deadline of 1833—depicting Chichikov as still
buying dead souls in Vol. 2 would be problematic. Smirnova-Chikina is to be
commended for having come up with real facts and dates, but, notwithstanding
her efforts, it’s highly doubtful that Gogol himself had exact dates and
circumstances in mind when planning the plot of his novel.
Another problematic issue. In Ch. 7 Chichikov wakes up back at his
hotel at the height of his good fortune. He now owns about four hundred male
dead souls; adding in the untaxable females and children, he would have some
1000 imaginary souls to transport to their new home in Kherson Province. Of
course, if the action is set before 1833 he would not be obliged to resettle
the females and children. By way of comparison with actual facts, here is some
information about the hero of the Napoleonic Wars, field marshal Mikhail
Kutuzov. Due largely to his battlefield achievements and a series of land
acquisitions for Russia under Catherine the Great after the Polish partition,
“Kutuzov had become one of the richest landowners in the empire. Excluding
Catherine’s new acquisitions, the population of the Russian Empire in the 1790s
was some 30 million persons. The gentry numbered about 80,000, not counting
landless gentry and the more economically diverse Polish nobility. But three
quarters of these Russian nobles owned fewer than sixty serfs: only about one
percent of them owned more than a thousand, about as many people as there are
billionaires in the U.S. today. There were only about fifty landowners at the
time who owned over five thousand serfs; among them was Kutuzov, whose estate
was estimated to contain 15,000. By comparison, the largest slaveholder in the
antebellum United States, Joshua John Ward [of Georgetown County, South
Carolina], owned just over a thousand slaves” (Grigory Afinogenov, “Field
Maneuvers,” NYRB, Oct. 19, 2023, p. 50).
The situation could not have changed that much forty years later, by
the 1830s, when DS is set. In his introduction to an English translation
of Gogol’s selected letters, Carl Proffer informs us that Gogol’s father was
“the owner of between 130 and 200 serfs [possibly an overestimate, URB, or
perhaps this included the untaxable women and children], and a Ukrainian estate
of larger-than-average size.” Citing a Russian source in a book about
Lermontov, Proffer adds that “In 1835 only 16 percent of the squires in Russia
owned more than 100 serfs” (Letters of Nikolai Gogol [selected and
edited by Carl R. Proffer], University of Michigan Press, 1967, p. 1, 211). In
a letter to S.P. Shevyrev from Rome (Feb. 28, 1843), Gogol affronts them all by
audaciously demanding that his friends and mentors—Shevyrev, S.T. Aksakov, and
Pogodin—get together and come up with some way of supporting him financially
for the next three or four years. He was already heavily in debt to them, and
practically none of the money he borrowed was ever paid back. In this same
letter he mentions in passing that his “estate is a good one, two hundred
souls.”
By far the richest of the landowners whom Chichikov comes across
is Stepan Plewshkin, who owns over 1000 male souls. Smirnova-Chikina counts the
wives and children and comes up with a figure of around 5000 total. Proffer’s
information, and the information about Kutuzov and his times above, if correct,
suggest, therefore, that Plewshkin could be in the one percent of richest
landowners in Russia in the 1830s. Given that at the end of Part One of DS
Chichikov already owns about 400 taxable serfs, it is no wonder that the
townspeople of N begin circulating the rumor that he is a millionaire. Having
run his swindle so far only in one provincial town and its environs—there is no
indication in the novel that he has been buying dead souls prior to
this—Chichikov is already a rich man on paper.
In Part Two Gogol has his protagonist continuing his efforts to
buy dead souls, something he would logically not do. There are good reasons for
quitting while he is ahead. Upon departing from the town of N, Chichikov already
has enough new capital in serfs to put through his plan of acquiring land in
Kherson, resettling his imaginary peasants there, and mortgaging his dead souls
at a considerable profit. Given that so few Russian landowners own this many
souls, if Chichikov acquires still more he might draw undue attention to
himself, and his semi-legal scheme could come to light. He might protest that
he has done nothing strictly illegal, but in Russia, then as now, the
authorities decide at random what they wish to be legal or illegal. The verdict
in Russian criminal trials, then and now, was/is decided in advance. Buying too
many dead souls is simply too risky.
There are various other improbabilities in the plot of DS.
Verisimilitude sometimes sags. For example, rumors spread fast in the town of N,
and one wonders why the townspeople don’t learn early on that Chichikov is
buying dead souls. Late in the book, after Chichikov, with the connivance and
cooperation of town officials, puts through the documentation on his purchases,
the whole town begins gossiping about how he’ll manage to transport the souls
safely to Kherson Province. Surely more questions would have arisen, even
before Nozdryov blurted out the truth at the ball. People would have wondered,
e.g., where Chichikov’s peasants were presently located physically. Where was he
keeping them, how was he housing and feeding roughly 1000 peasants—four hundred
if only the males—prior to their departure for Kherson?
In a novel in which logic were preponderant, Chichikov, upon
leaving the town of N in the final chapter, would already be enroute to
Kherson, to put his scheme into practice. Instead he—and apparently the
narrators and author of DS—have no idea where he is bound in Ch. 11.
He’s just out on the road, headed somewhere, and in the final scene he
ends up God knows where. Gogol apparently did not worry unduly about the
prospect of holes in his plotline or the exact dates of the action. He had other,
bigger fish to fry in his narrative skillet: mainly the huge sturgeon called
laughter, heaps of skaz narrators wallowing in hyperbole, and,
unfortunately toward the end, megalomanic dreams.
[excerpt from the forthcoming book by U.R. Bowie:
THE
FUTILE SEARCH FOR A LIVING SOUL
[A
NEW READING OF GOGOL’S DEAD SOULS («МЕРТВЫЕ ДУШИ»)]
