Dead Souls
by Zugzwang Marc Chagall's illustration for Dead Souls The anti-hero of Gogol's Dead Souls, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, had his reasons for cultivating the nobility of a provincial Russian backwater, and buying from them, for a nominal sum, those of their serfs who happened to be dead. This saved the vendors an amount of poll tax (which continued to be payable for some time after death) and transformed Chichikov himself into a gentleman proprietor of some 400 serfs, potentially capable of raising a large loan on these assets and eloping (presumably under another name) with the Governor's daughter. When I first read Gogol, I found the whole idea totally obscure and mystifying, and I'm not sure that he ever spells out in words of one syllable how Chichikov's business model is supposed to work. There's a highly respectable view that the whole thing was always intended as pure shaggy-dog, and it's only fitting that it breaks off in mid-sentence, as an act of Shandyean surrealism. Compared with the COVID-19 mortality statistics, however, Gogol provides us with a paradigm of lucidity. Chichikov had found a way of monetising actual serfs who merely happened to have died. We have a Government agency, Public Health England, which seems to be busy manufacturing statistical deaths, to no purpose that makes even Chichikovian sense. The problem ...
