human error

“There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, not even a child would make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it.”*

Chichikov, the main character in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, travels widely across the Russian countryside trying to purchase dead peasants from noblemen. Not literally, though – he’s not digging up corpses and carrying them across Russia with him in tightly sealed bags. No, he’s just taking advantage of a peculiarity of early nineteenth-century tsarist Russia. Specifically, the census counts how many serfs are owned by any given particular noblemen; once the peasants die for any reason, they are still counted by the state as being alive, which matters significantly for the owner, who must continue to pay taxes on their behalf until the next census counts them as dead. Chichikov’s goal is to travel across Russia purchasing ownership of these dead but legally living “souls.” If you want to know why, read the book.

For a while, he is well-loved by everyone he encounters, and only attempts to strike deals with a select few, lying to everyone else and saying he has purchased living peasants. A master of manipulation, he fluidly tweaks and transforms his personality to match the situation and the person at-hand, making himself perfectly “agreeable” in every way. When someone is vain, he flatters him, praises him, tells him what a fine estate the person runs. When someone has superstitions regarding life after death, he plays into these convictions, cleverly using them against her. Stupidly, almost everyone he encounters falls for it for a long time – thinking with certainty that Chichikov is one of the finest men they have ever met.

The whole time you read it, you find yourself laughing at how easily many of these people are deceived by Chichikov’s tactics. He runs into resistance now and then, but even if a character manages to defy the deception, you can be certain that the successful figure is nevertheless crazy or unthinking in some other respect (one of the characters who resists Chichikov’s flattery is a pathological gambler, who tries to use his dead souls as a part of a bet with Chichikov, only to cheat at checkers against the traveler in doing so, thereafter attempting to murder him, surrounding Chichikov with his serfs and chanting threats).

In any case, our hero eventually manages to cause quite an uproar. It gets out that he has been buying dead souls from noblemen in the countryside, and no can comprehend why he would be doing so (he had told everyone in the town that he had bought living peasants for “resettlement”). The irony here is that, even once an entire town sees through Chichikov’s trickery, they draw the most absurd conclusions regarding what he is actually up to. A slew of outlandish rumors spread throughout the gentry, including the notion that everything is part of a grand plot to kidnap the governor’s daughter, and another belief that he is an important man from the state sent to, as Gogol would say, do “God knows what.”

To resolve the dispute, a large group of aristocratic men decide to gather together to establish once and for all just who this Chichikov is – what type of person he is, what his history is and why exactly he has come to their own.

And now we come to one of the most memorable experiences of reading this novel.

“The Tail of Captain Kopeikin.”

For almost six full pages, the postmaster tells the story of a man called, surprise, Captain Kopeikin – a soldier who lost an arm and had a leg blown off in war, and spent several months petitioning the tsar for what we could call veteran’s benefits, eventually wandering the countryside once rejected and joining a band of highwaymen. “[Chichikov], dear gentleman, is none other than Captain Kopeikin!”

Gogol writes six pages of this extremely detailed story of a man who has no leg and no arm and is proposed by one of our inane Russian aristocrats to be our hero, Chichikov.

“ ‘Only forgive me, Ivan Andreevish,’ the police chief said suddenly, interrupting him, ‘you yourself said that Captain Kopeikin was missing an arm and a leg, while Chichikov…’ ”

Embarassed, the postmaster struggles to come up with an excuse. Maybe Chichikov has a fake arm or a fake leg – I mean, after all, there have been many technological advances in this direction, haven’t there? But no, it’s just obvious nonsense – although it takes everyone else six pages to realize this, it is, in the end, just not acceptable.

It is after just a few more equally careless lapses in judgment that the quote with which I began this entry shows up (they spend several pages questioning the gambler mentioned above, who they know to be insane and a habitual liar, and who claims to have gone to school with Chichikov). It actually starts to seem just plain unrealistic, simply because the mistakes made by the characters only become increasingly unthinkable.

“And in the world of mankind there are many whole centuries which, it would seem, should be crossed out and abolished as unnecessary. There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, not even a child would make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it.”

Sarcastically shocked, he laments that government officials “should scare themselves so; to create such nonsense, to stray so far from the truth, when even a child could see what the matter was!”

But after getting a good laugh out of his reader, the author ceases criticizing his characters and humanity in general and turns towards reminding his audience that they, too, are human. That I, you, and we are no better than the child-like, perpetually blind, nonsensical aristocrats in Dead Souls. And that while you are so conceitedly laughing at them, someone else will be looking down and laughing at you.

“Man is generous with the word ‘fool,’ and is ready to serve it up to his neighbor twenty times a day…It is easy for the reader to judge, looking down from his comfortable corner at the top, from which the whole horizon opens out, upon all that is going on below, where man can only see the nearest object….The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendents will also laugh afterwards.”

*Gogol, Nikolai, Dead Souls, New York, NY: Vintage Classics, 1997.