er shown than in the gift
which he made to Gogol of the plan of this book. He could not have
executed it himself as well. The work must forever rank as a Russian
classic; it ought to rank as a universal classic. The types are as
fresh, true, and vivid to one who knows the Russia of to-day as they
were when they were first introduced to the enthusiastic public of 1842.

In the pre-Emancipation days, a soul meant a male serf. The women were
not counted in the periodical revisions, though the working unit, a
_tyaglo_, consisted of a man, his wife, and his horse--the indispensable
trinity to agricultural labor. In the interval between the revisions, a
landed proprietor continued to pay for all the serfs accredited to him
on the official list, the births being reckoned for convenience as an
exact offset to the deaths. Another provision of the law was, that no
one should purchase serfs without the land to which they belonged,
except for the purpose of colonization. An ingenious fraud suggested by
a combination of these two laws forms the foundation of 'Dead Souls.'
The hero, Tchitchikoff, is an official who has struggled up ambitiously
and shrewdly, through numerous vicissitudes of bribe-taking, extortion,
and ensuing discomfiture, to a snug berth in the custom-house service,
from which he is ejected under circumstances which render further
flights difficult if not impossible. In this strait he hits upon the
idea of purchasing from landed proprietors of mediocre probity the souls
who are dead, though still nominally alive, and on whom they are forced
to pay taxes. Land is being given away gratuitously, in the southern
governments of Kherson and Tauris, to any one who will settle upon it,
as every one knows. His plan is to buy one thousand non-existent serfs
("dead souls"), at a maximum of one hundred rubles apiece, for
colonization on an equally non-existent estate in the south, and then,
by mortgaging them to the loan bank for the nobility known as the
Council of Guardians, obtain a capital of two hundred thousand rubles.
In pursuance of this clever scheme he sets out on his travels, visits
provincial towns and the estates of landed gentry of every shade of
character, dishonesty, and financial standing, where he either buys for
a song, or cajoles from them as a gift, large numbers of "dead souls."
It is unnecessary and impossible to do more than reinforce the hint
which this statement contains, by the assurance that Gogol use