Dead Souls

There, in that little room so familiar to the reader, with the door blocked up by a chest of drawers, and cockroaches occasionally peeking from the corners, the state of his mind and spirit was uncomfortable, as uncomfortable as the armchair in which he sat. His heart felt unpleasant, troubled; some burdensome emptiness lingered in it. "Devil take all of you who thought up these balls!" he said in vexation. "What are the fools so glad about? There are crop failures, high prices in the provinces, and here they are with their balls! A fine thing: decked out in their female rags! So what if she's wrapped herself in a thousand roubles' worth! And it's at the expense of peasant quitrent or, worse still, at the expense of our own good conscience. Everyone knows why you take bribes and bend the truth: so as to pay for your wife's shawl or hoopskirt or whatever they're called, confound them. And what for? So that some strumpet Sidorovna won't say the postmaster's wife's dress was better, and so—bang, there goes a thousand roubles. They shout: A ball, a ball, a gay time!'—a ball is just trash, not in the Russian spirit, not in the Russian nature; devil knows what it is: an adult, a man of age, suddenly pops out all in black, plucked and tightly fitted like a little imp, and goes mincing away with his feet. Some man, dancing with his partner, can be discussing important business with someone else, while at the same time twirling his legs right and left like a little goat. . . It's all apery, all apery! The Frenchman at forty is the same child he was at fifteen, so let's all do likewise! No, really . . . after each ball it's as if you'd committed some sin; you don't even want to remember it. The head is simply empty, as after talking with a man of society; he talks about all sorts of things, touches lightly on everything, says everything he's pulled out of books, brightly, prettily, but there's no trace of any of it in his head, and you see then that even talking with a simple merchant who knows only his business, but knows it firmly and practically, is better than all these baubles. So, what can possibly be squeezed out of this ball? So, what if some writer, say, decided to describe the whole scene as it is? So, then in the book it would come out just as witless as in nature. What is it—moral? immoral? It's simply devil-knows-what! You'd spit and close the book." So unfavorable was Chichikov's opinion of balls in general; but it seems another reason for indignation was mixed in here. He was mainly vexed not at the ball, but at the fact that he had happened to trip up, that he had suddenly appeared before everyone looking like God knows what, that he had played some strange, ambiguous role. Of course, looking at it with the eye of a reasonable man, he saw that it was all absurd, that a stupid word meant nothing, particularly now, when the main business had already been properly done. But man is strange: he was greatly upset by the ill disposition of those very people whom he did not respect and with regard to whom he had spoken so sharply, denouncing their vanity and finery. This was the more vexatious to him since, on sorting out the matter clearly, he saw that he himself was partly the cause of it. He did not, however, get angry with himself, and in that, of course, he was right. We all have a little weakness for sparing ourselves somewhat, and prefer to try and find some neighbor on whom to vent our vexation, a servant, for instance, or a subordinate official who turns up at that moment, or a wife, or, finally, a chair, which gets flung devil knows where, straight at the door, so that the armrest and back come flying off: that will teach it what wrath is. So Chichikov, too, soon found a neighbor who could drag onto his own back everything his vexation might suggest to him. This neighbor was Nozdryov, and, needless to say, he got it from all sides and ends, as only some crook of a village elder or coachman gets it from some traveled, experienced captain, or even general, who on top of many expressions that have become classical, adds many unknown ones, the invention of which belongs properly to himself. The whole of Nozdryov's genealogy was examined and many members of his family in the line of ascent suffered greatly.