Dead Souls

A vast, old garden stretching behind the house, extending beyond the village and then disappearing in the fields, overgrown and overrun, alone seemed to refresh this vast estate and alone was fully picturesque in its scenic devastation. In green clouds and irregular, leaf-fluttering cupolas against the sky's horizon lay the joined tops of the freely branching trees. The colossal white trunk of a birch, deprived of its crown, broken off in a tempest or thunderstorm, rose out of this green thickness and rounded in the air like a regular, gleaming marble column; the sharp, slanting break that topped it instead of a capital showed dark against its snowy whiteness, like a hat or a black bird. Wild hops, smothering the elder, mountain ash, and hazel bushes underneath and then running over the top of the whole thicket, finally raced upwards, twining around half the length of the broken birch. Having reached the middle, it hung down from there and began to catch at the tops of other trees or else dangled in air, tying its thin, grasping hooks into rings, swayed lightly by the air. In places the green thickets, lit by the sun, parted and revealed an unlit gap between them, yawning like a dark maw; it was all shrouded in shadow, and in its dark depths there barely flashed a running, narrow path, a collapsed railing, a rickety gazebo, the hollowed, decrepit trunk of a willow, a hoary hawthorn sticking out from behind the willow in a dense stubble of tangled and intertwined leaves and branches, withered in that terrible occlusion, and, finally, a young maple bough, stretching from the side its green pawlike leaves, one of them suddenly transformed by the sun, which got under it God knows how, into something transparent and fiery, shining wondrously in that dense darkness. To one side, at the very edge of the garden, several tall aspens, grown beyond the level of the rest, lifted up huge crows' nests on their fluttering tops. From some of them, broken but not quite sundered branches hung down with their withered leaves. In short, it was all just right, as neither nature nor art can contrive, but as only occurs when they join together, when, after the heaped-up, often senseless, labors of men, nature makes a finishing pass with her chisel, lightening the heavy masses, removing the crude-feeling regularity and indigent gaps through which the bare, undisguised plan peeps out, and imparts a wondrous warmth to all that was created in coldly measured cleanness and neatness.

Having made one or two turns, our hero finally found himself right in front of the house, which now seemed more mournful still. Green mold covered the already decayed wood of the fence and gate. A crowd of buildings—servants' quarters, barns, cellars, all visibly decaying—filled the courtyard; near them, to right and left, gates could be seen leading to other yards. Everything bespoke the vast scale on which estate life had once gone on here, and everything now looked dismal. Nothing to enliven the picture could be noticed: no doors opening, no people coming out from anywhere, no lively household hustle and bustle! Only the main gates were open, and that because a muzhik had driven in with a loaded cart covered with bast matting, appearing as if by design to enliven this desolate place; at other times the gates, too, were tightly locked, for a giant padlock was hanging in the iron staple. By one of the buildings Chichikov soon noticed some figure, who had begun squabbling with the muzhik on the cart. For a long time he could not make out the figure's sex, male or female. It was dressed in something completely indefinite, much like a woman's housecoat, with a cap on its head such as household serf wenches wear in the country, only the voice seemed to him rather too husky for a woman. "Ai, a female!" he thought to himself, and added at once: "Ah, no!" Finally he said, "A female, of course!"—having looked more intently. The figure for her part was also staring intently at him. It seemed that a visitor was a remarkable thing for her, because she scrutinized not only him, but also Selifan and the horses, from tail to muzzle. By the keys hanging from her belt, and by the fact that she was scolding the muzhik in rather abusive terms, Chichikov concluded that this must be the housekeeper.

"Listen, dearie," he said, getting out of the britzka, "about the master..."

"Not home," the housekeeper interrupted, without waiting for the end of the question, and then, after a minute, she added: "What do you want?" "It's business.

"Go in!" said the housekeeper, turning away and showing him her back, dusted with flour, with a big rip lower down.