“Yes, they are so reckoned,” replied Tchitchikoff.
“Well, what are you afraid of?” said the secretary: “one has died, another has been born, so the people remain available all the same.”
The secretary evidently understood how to talk to the point. But in the meantime, the most inspired thought that ever entered a human brain had flashed upon that of our hero.
“Ah, I am a regular Akim the Simpleton!” he said to himself: “I have been hunting for my mittens, and they are both in my belt! Now, suppose that I buy all the souls which have died since the last census was taken; and suppose that I obtain a thousand of them, say, and that the Council of Guardians will lend, say, two hundred roubles a soul; there I shall have a capital of two hundred thousand roubles! And the times are propitious just now: there was an epidemic not long ago, and not a few people died, glory be to God! The landed gentry have also been losing at cards, and carousing and squandering in proper fashion; everybody has crawled off to Petersburg, to enter the service; their estates are abandoned, or managed at hap-hazard; they find it harder every year to pay their taxes; so it may chance that I shall be able to earn a copeck once more. Of course, it is difficult and troublesome, and it would be the finishing touch if any scandal arose from this. But what is a man’s mind given to him for! To contend with difficulties of course. And the best thing about it is, that the affair will appear incredible to everybody, and no one will believe it. It is true that without land it is impossible either to purchase or to pawn serfs. But I will buy them for colonisation—for colonisation! The land in the provinces of Tauris and Kherson is now given away gratuitously to anyone who will settle upon it. I will take them all there! To the Khersonese with them! There let them live! And the colonisation can be effected in legal form, according to the decrees of the courts. If the officials want to review the serfs, I won’t object. I will present a certificate, with the signature of the captain-ispravnik himself. The village can be styled the ‘Tchitchikoff Sloboda,’8 or else called after my baptismal name, the ‘Hamlet of Pavlovskoe.’ ”
So this is the way in which that strange project was formed in the brain of our hero; and I am not sure whether the reader will feel grateful or not to him for conceiving it; but it is difficult to express how grateful the author is to him, for say what you like, had this scheme never entered the head of our friend Tchitchikoff, this book would never have made its appearance on the earth.
Our hero crossed himself in Russian fashion, and set to work. Under pretence of selecting a place of residence, and other suitable pretexts, he undertook to obtain a peep at various corners of our empire, and especially at those which had suffered more than the others from mishaps—bad crops, mortality, and so forth: in short, all the spots where he could most comfortably and cheaply purchase the people whom he required. He did not address himself at random to any landowner, but selected the men who were most to his taste, or those with whom the transaction of such business would present the fewest difficulties, after first making their acquaintance, and disposing them in his favour, so that, as far as possible, he might acquire the dead serfs out of friendship, instead of by purchase.
This, then, is the complete portrait of our hero. But a final explanation of one characteristic may be required: What is he as regards moral qualities? That he is not a hero composed of perfection and virtue is obvious. Who is he? A knave, of course. Why a knave? Why be so stern towards another? There are no knaves among us now: there are only well-intentioned people, agreeable people abroad; and they are all talking of virtue.
No doubt the public will be dissatisfied with our hero; but this is not so hard to bear as is the fact that there lives in the author’s mind the invincible conviction that, under different circumstances, his readers might have been pleased with this same hero, with this very Tchitchikoff. If the author had not looked deeper than others into his hero’s soul, if he had not beheld in its depths things which escape most people; if he had not revealed the secret thoughts for which no man gives another credit, but had depicted him in the light in which he appeared to the whole town, to Maniloff and other persons, then everyone would have been delighted, and would have considered him a very interesting man. Perhaps neither