ften
judged by the numbers of "souls" he possessed. There was a periodical
census of serfs, say once every ten or twenty years. This being the
case, an owner had to pay a tax on every "soul" registered at the
last census, though some of the serfs might have died in the meantime.
Nevertheless, the system had its material advantages, inasmuch as an
owner might borrow money from a bank on the "dead souls" no less than
on the living ones. The plan of Chichikov, Gogol's hero-villain, was
therefore to make a journey through Russia and buy up the "dead souls,"
at reduced rates of course, saving their owners the government tax,
and acquiring for himself a list of fictitious serfs, which he meant to
mortgage to a bank for a considerable sum. With this money he would buy
an estate and some real life serfs, and make the beginning of a fortune.

Obviously, this plot, which is really no plot at all but merely a ruse
to enable Chichikov to go across Russia in a troika, with Selifan the
coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent
opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama,
peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in
comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of
his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are
not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, on the
stage say, we shall roll about with laughter and only wonder we did not
notice it before." But the comic in Dead Souls is merely external. Let
us see how Pushkin, who loved to laugh, regarded the work. As Gogol read
it aloud to him from the manuscript the poet grew more and more gloomy
and at last cried out: "God! What a sad country Russia is!" And later he
said of it: "Gogol invents nothing; it is the simple truth, the terrible
truth."

The work on one hand was received as nothing less than an exposure of
all Russia--what would foreigners think of it? The liberal elements,
however, the critical Belinsky among them, welcomed it as a revelation,
as an omen of a freer future. Gogol, who had meant to do a service to
Russia and not to heap ridicule upon her, took the criticisms of the
Slavophiles to heart; and he palliated his critics by promising to bring
about in the succeeding parts of his novel the redemption of Chichikov
and the other "knaves and blockheads." But the "Westerner" Belinsky
and others of the liberal camp were mistrustfu