Dead Souls Illustrated

The tale follows the exploits of Chichikov, a middle-elderly gentleman of middling social elegance and means. Chichikov arrives in a small city and activates the appeal to woo key nearby officers and landowners. He famous little approximately his past, or his purpose, as he units approximately sporting out his weird and mysterious plan to acquire "lifeless souls."The government could tax the landowners primarily based totally on what number of serfs (or "souls") the landowner owned, decided with the aid of using the census. Censuses in this era have been infrequent, so landowners could regularly be paying taxes on serfs that have been not living, hence the "lifeless souls." It is those lifeless souls, current on paper only, that Chichikov seeks to buy from the landlords withinside the villages he visits; he simply tells the possible dealers that he has a use for them, and that the dealers could be higher off anyway, for the reason that promoting them could relieve the existing proprietors of a useless tax burden.