Why a 19th-century con artist bought hundreds of deceased Russian serfs for profit

Art · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 masterpiece follows Pavel Chichikov, a disgraced civil servant with a bizarre get-rich-quick scheme. By purchasing the rights to serfs who had died since the last census, he aimed to mortgage these non-existent assets for massive loans. It is a dark, satirical exploration of human greed and bureaucratic absurdity.

The premise of Dead Souls hinges on a specific quirk of the Russian Empire’s tax system. Landowners were taxed based on the number of serfs they owned, as recorded in infrequent census revisions. Because these lists were rarely updated, owners remained liable for taxes on serfs who had long since passed away. Chichikov, a social climber, travels the countryside offering to relieve landlords of this financial burden by purchasing their 'dead souls' for a nominal fee. His ultimate goal is to use these paper-only assets as collateral to secure a substantial loan, allowing him to establish himself as a wealthy landowner.

Gogol, who described his work as an 'epic poem in prose,' intended the novel to be a three-volume epic, but he destroyed the manuscript for the second volume shortly before his death. The surviving text, which ends mid-sentence, is a biting satire of the Russian middle aristocracy. Chichikov encounters a gallery of eccentric characters, including the miserly Plyushkin and the sentimental Manilov, each representing facets of poshlost—a Russian term for vulgarity and moral emptiness. While early critics viewed the work as a reformist critique of the social order, later modernist scholars like Vladimir Nabokov argued that the plot was merely a vehicle for Gogol’s irrational, descriptive prose.

The novel’s legacy has transcended literature, inspiring diverse adaptations ranging from a 1932 Moscow Art Theatre production directed by Constantin Stanislavski to a 1976 opera by Rodion Shchedrin. Marc Chagall also famously illustrated the work with etchings between 1923 and 1927. Despite its unfinished state, the novel remains a cornerstone of Russian literature, celebrated for its ability to transform a macabre, absurd premise into a profound reflection on the moral rot of a society obsessed with status and appearance.

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