t. Why,
were I myself to buy up a few souls which are dead--to buy them before
a new revision list shall have been made, the Council of Public Trust
might pay me two hundred roubles apiece for them, and I might find
myself with, say, a capital of two hundred thousand roubles! The present
moment is particularly propitious, since in various parts of the country
there has been an epidemic, and, glory be to God, a large number of
souls have died of it. Nowadays landowners have taken to card-playing
and junketting and wasting their money, or to joining the Civil Service
in St. Petersburg; consequently their estates are going to rack and
ruin, and being managed in any sort of fashion, and succeeding in paying
their dues with greater difficulty each year. That being so, not a man
of the lot but would gladly surrender to me his dead souls rather than
continue paying the poll-tax; and in this fashion I might make--well,
not a few kopecks. Of course there are difficulties, and, to avoid
creating a scandal, I should need to employ plenty of finesse; but man
was given his brain to USE, not to neglect. One good point about the
scheme is that it will seem so improbable that in case of an accident,
no one in the world will believe in it. True, it is illegal to buy or
mortgage peasants without land, but I can easily pretend to be buying
them only for transferment elsewhere. Land is to be acquired in the
provinces of Taurida and Kherson almost for nothing, provided that one
undertakes subsequently to colonise it; so to Kherson I will 'transfer'
them, and long may they live there! And the removal of my dead souls
shall be carried out in the strictest legal form; and if the authorities
should want confirmation by testimony, I shall produce a letter signed
by my own superintendent of the Khersonian rural police--that is to
say, by myself. Lastly, the supposed village in Kherson shall be called
Chichikovoe--better still Pavlovskoe, according to my Christian name."

In this fashion there germinated in our hero's brain that strange scheme
for which the reader may or may not be grateful, but for which the
author certainly is so, seeing that, had it never occurred to Chichikov,
this story would never have seen the light.

After crossing himself, according to the Russian custom, Chichikov set
about carrying out his enterprise. On pretence of selecting a place
wherein to settle, he started forth to inspect various corners of the
Russian Empire,