Dead Souls

Obscure and modest was our hero's origin. His parents were of the nobility, but whether ancient or honorary—God knows; in appearance he did not resemble them: at least the relation who was present at his birth, a short, brief woman of the kind usually called a wee thing, on taking the child in her arms, exclaimed: "Quite different than I thought! He should have taken after his grandmother on his mother's side, that would have been best, but he came out just as the saying goes: 'Not like mother, not like father, but like Roger the lodger.'" Life, at its beginning, looked upon him somehow sourly, inhospitably, through some dim, snow-covered window: not one friend, not one childhood companion. A small room with small windows, never opened winter or summer, the father an ailing man, in a long frock coat trimmed with lambskin and with knitted slippers on his bare feet, who sighed incessantly as he paced the room, spitting into a box of sand that stood in the corner, the eternal sitting on the bench, pen in hand, ink-stained fingers and even lips, the eternal maxim before his eyes: "Do not lie, obey your elders, keep virtue in your heart"; the eternal shuffling and scraping of the slippers in the room, the familiar but ever stern voice: "Fooling again!" that resounded whenever the child, bored with the monotonous work, attached some flourish or tail to a letter; and the eternally familiar, ever unpleasant feeling when, after these words, the edge of his ear was rolled up very painfully by the nails of long fingers reaching from behind: this is the poor picture of his early childhood, of which he barely preserved a pale memory. But in life everything changes swiftly and livelily: and one day, with the first spring sun and the flooding streams, the father, taking his son, drove off with him in a cart, dragged by a runty piebald horse known among horse traders as a magpie; she was driven by a coachman, a hunchbacked little man, progenitor of the only serf family belonging to Chichikov's father, who filled almost all the positions in the house. This magpie dragged them for a little over a day and a half; they slept on the road, crossed a river, lunched on cold pie and roast lamb, and only on the morning of the third day did they reach town. In unsuspected magnificence the town streets flashed before the boy and left him gaping for a few minutes. Then the magpie plopped together with the cart into a hole at the head of a narrow lane, all straining downhill and clogged with mud; she toiled there for a long time, using all her strength and kneading away with her legs, urged on by the hunchback and by the master himself, and finally dragged them into a little yard that sat on a slope, with two flowering apple trees in front of a little old house, and with a garden behind, low, puny, consisting only of a mountain ash, an elder, and, hidden in its depths, a little wooden shed, roofed with shingles, with a narrow matte window. Here lived their relative, a wobbly little crone, who still went to market every morning and then dried her stockings by the samovar. She patted the boy on the cheek and admired his plumpness. Here he was to stay and go every day to study at the town school. The father, after spending the night, set out on the road the very next day. On parting, the parental eyes shed no tears; fifty kopecks in copper were given for expenses and treats, and, which was more important, a wise admonition: "Watch out, then, Pavlusha, study, don't be a fool or a scapegrace, and above all try to please your teachers and superiors. If you please your superior, then even if you don't succeed in your studies and God has given you no talent, you will still do well and get ahead of everybody. Don't keep company with your schoolmates, they won't teach you any good; but if you do, then keep company with the richer ones, on the chance that they may be useful to you. Do not regale or treat anyone, but rather behave in such a way that they treat you, and above all keep and save your kopeck: it is the most reliable thing in the world. A comrade or companion will cheat you and be the first to betray you in trouble; but a kopeck will never betray you, whatever trouble you get into. You can do everything and break through everything with a kopeck." Having delivered this admonition, the father parted from his son and dragged himself back home with his magpie, and after that he never saw him again, but his words and admonitions sank deeply into his soul.