Chichikov as hedge fund operator

[Nora Favorov]

>From the Wall Street Journal:	

READBACK
By CYNTHIA CROSSEN 	


Underbelly of Russian Provincials
In 'Dead Souls,' Nikolai Gogol
Exposes the Hypocrisy
Of His Characters' Hearts
June 12, 2008

We've all known men -- and women -- like Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. In fact,
if you're reading this at your office, there's probably one in the next
cubicle or down the hall. He's slick, suave, maybe a little reptilian, but
people instinctively trust him because of his hair and his manners.

So it was with Chichikov, the hero of Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls,"
published in 1842. Tsarist Russia had systems to game, and Chichikov
invented a new financial instrument to game them. A Russian's wealth then
was measured by the number of serfs (or souls, as they were often referred
to) he owned. Serfs were property, so you could take out a mortgage against
them, but you also had to pay taxes on them. Years could pass before the
taxation apparatus officially recognized the death of a serf. So many
landowners paid taxes on dead serfs.

Chichikov knew a spread when he saw one. He would buy some masters' dead
serfs at a deep discount. When he had amassed enough names, he would use the
list as collateral for a mortgage. As far as the state was concerned,
Chichikov's serfs were a solid asset. Today, Chichikov would be running a
real-estate hedge fund.

As he traveled around provincial Russia making sales calls (by horse-drawn
coach on cobblestone, very painful), Chichikov met a parade of gaudy
characters -- caricatures, really -- of landowners, government officials and
peasants. Nozdrev, for example, whose "card-playing was not entirely above
suspicion, since he showed great finesse in getting the card he happened to
require, and thus the game often turned into another sort of sport." Or the
bearish gourmand Sobakevich: "If we're having pork, I want the whole pig on
the table; if it's mutton, bring me the whole sheep; if it's goose, I want
to see everything."

Before Chichikov made his pitch to these men, they were impressed by his
good breeding and smart conversation. But they were baffled, and suspicious,
after hearing his offer, although several cheerfully struck deals. Something
wasn't right about accumulating dead serfs, but no one could put their
finger on what it was.

By making Chichikov a rascal, Gogol was breaking from early 19th-century
Russian (and European) literary tradition by exposing the meanness and
hypocrisy in his characters' hearts. Fiction was supposed to ennoble its
readers. Gogol's characters were not noble. Contemporary Russian critics
condemned "Dead Souls" for its lack of taste, barbarous language, utter
filth and childish rhetoric. They worried that it might give foreigners the
wrong impression of their beloved motherland.

Gogol admitted that he was more interested in the underbelly of the Russian
provincials than their virtues. "Him I have taken as a type to show forth
the vices and failings, rather than the merits and virtues, of the
commonplace Russian individual; and the characters which revolve around him
have also been selected for the purpose of demonstrating our national
weaknesses and shortcomings."

And as Vladimir Nabokov later wrote about the critics' sanctimonious
reaction to "Dead Souls," "Morally, Chichikov was hardly guilty of any
special crime in attempting to buy up dead men in a country where live men
were lawfully purchased and pawned."

After offending Russian sensibilities with his play "The Inspector General,"
which appeared in 1836, Gogol fled to Europe, and he wrote "Dead Souls" in
Rome. He completed most of a second volume of "Dead Souls" (at one point he
envisioned it as a trilogy), but he burned it before he died in 1852 at the
age of 42. Scraps of the manuscript survived, and some have been published.

Perhaps the greatest charm of "Dead Souls" is the way Gogol often steps
outside his narrative to talk directly to the reader. "It is dangerous to
look too deeply into ladies' hearts, and so I shall continue simply skimming
the surface," he wrote. "Let us dive headlong into life with its toneless
clatter and jingling bells and see what Chichikov's up to." And my favorite
aside, after Chichikov has described women as "the deluxe articles in the
store of life."

"I'm sorry to have this expression, picked up in the street, come from the
mouth of my hero!" Gogol wrote. "But what can I do -- such is the lot of an
author in Russia."

"Dead Souls" is available free online through Project Gutenberg and other
electronic book collections. The copy I read was a 1961 translation by
Andrew R. MacAndrew, but there is also a 1997 edition by the superb
translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Write to Cynthia Crossen at cynthia.crossen at wsj.com4

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