Women were
not taken account of in the periodical revisions; although the working
unit, or _tyaglo_, consisted of a man, his wife, and his horse--the
indispensable trinity in agricultural labors. In the interval between
revisions, a landed proprietor continued to pay taxes on all the male
serfs accredited to him on the official list, births being considered as
an exact offset to deaths, for the sake of convenience. 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
basis of plot for "Dead Souls." The hero, Tchitchikoff, is an official
who has struggled up, cleverly but not too honestly, through the devious
ways of bribe-taking, extortion, and not infrequent detection and
disgrace, to a snug berth in the customs service, from which he has been
ejected under conditions which render further upward flight quite out of
the question. In this dilemma, he hits upon the idea of purchasing from
landed proprietors of mediocre probity all their "souls" which are dead,
though still nominally alive, and are taxed as such. Land is being given
away gratuitously in the southern governments of Kherson and Tauris to
any one who will settle on it. This is a matter of public knowledge, and
Tchitchikoff's plan consists in buying a 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. He will
then mortgage them to the loan bank of the nobility, known as the
Council of Guardians, and obtain a capital. In pursuance of this clever
scheme, the adventurer sets out on his travels, visits provincial towns,
and the estates of landed gentry of every shade of character, honesty,
and financial standing; and from them he buys for a song (or cajoles
from them for nothing, as a gift, when they are a trifle scrupulous over
the tempting prospect of illegal gain) huge numbers of "dead souls."
Pushkin himself could not have used with such tremendous effect the
phenomenal opportunities which this plot of Tchitchikoff's wanderings
offered for setting forth Russian manners, characters, customs, all
Russian life, in town and country, as Gogol did. The author even
contrives, in keen asides and allusions, to throw almost equal light on
the life of the capital as well. His portraits of women are not ex