Nikolai Vasilyevich specially endowed Pavel Ivanovich with typical, vague, general features. The author caught the future with his creative intuition. He realized that the Sobakeviches and Manilovs needed to be preserved for future descendants. These types were already disappearing at that time and needed to be immortalized in detail and thoroughly. Gogol writes their figures, manners, voices and quirks with the same care with which the Egyptians of antiquity mummified the dead, placing each organ in a special clay konob, and only threw the brain out, because they did not know about its function. But the author writes the main character as an impressionist - with broad strokes, without going into details, but creating a vivid feeling: "I know this gentleman." Gogol felt that the future belonged to Chichikov, Chichikov was the master of the present and future epochs. While he is forced to smile, doing business, while he is still shuffling his leg. But this is for now. In the future, he will be transformed and posture. Today he is alone - and he is forced to flash against the background of small and large people. There will be a time when there will be many Chichikovs, and already the people, small and large, will scurry against their background. That is why the portrait of Pavel Ivanovich is not painted in detail, because he is to become a typical person, with common features. Which, in fact, has already happened.

Chichikov is a Russian capitalist of the period of the first accumulation of capital. His main feature is the ability to make money out of thin air. Let American Fords preach that the key to wealth is not golden, but wrenched. Chichikov is a Russian man, with a deep sense of national pride and a corresponding contempt for all "Germans". He has no time to invent and improve production. Long, and unreliable. Money must be taken wisely and immediately.

I write and think: isn't "Dead Souls" a handbook for the creators of voucher privatization, defaults, coupons, and barter schemes. In short, those who enriched themselves in certain times overnight or in a week, leaving the people with a figure of three fingers? If so, then I take my hat off. Poor goose pen or ballpoint pen workers will always have enough snobbery to look down on a poorly educated millionaire. And how is a millionaire with millions because he is well acquainted with the classics and reads them not for leisure, but for life?

Judas' passion for money was called the root of all evil by St. Paul. Money opens access to "all the bad things", and this is why it is valued. In the last chapter of the first volume of "Dead Souls", where the details of Chichikov's biography are first reported, it is not for nothing that it is said that our hero did not love money by itself. He was not a miserly knight, and he was not a knight at all. Life in poverty and daily trips to the basement, where gold shimmered in the glare of greasy cinders in chests, were not for him. He would rather put his signature under the phrase of Philip of Macedon, who said that an ass loaded with gold would open the gates of any fortress to him.

Money can be loved for its ability to turn into stone houses with fountains, into a diamond hairpin for a tie, into a richly laid table, into a woman's love, into social significance. You never know what gold coins and bank notes can turn into! Is it not possible to say that this is the philosopher's stone that the alchemists were looking for, the stone that gives access to all pleasures?!

So away with quixoticism, away with singing under the window and stupid fights. Away with romanticism, and long live sober practicality. You need to get money. It is to get, not to earn, because "earning" means working long and earning little. They say that you can't build in chorus by honest work, but life runs by, and you want so much.

"Both in you and in me there is a part of the soul of Judas," says Justin Popovich in one of his sermons during Holy Week. Gogol says about the same thing. He says that you don't need to be too strict. It is worth checking yourself - is there a particle of Pavel Ivanovich in me? And how do I value money more than anything sacred? And precisely for this reason I value that I hope to buy with them either forbidden sweets, or power, if not over the world, then over my native city, at least?

The question is not idle, like all the questions raised by Gogol.

As a historical type, Chichikov had many obstacles in Russia to develop. Cherished dreams more than once slipped away from him, not so much from under his nose, but from his very hands. As the hero of Gogol's poem, he, having endured thousands of humiliations, soared to the desired height, but changes in fate suddenly threw him down, and the difficult ascent began again.

Soon after the times described by Gogol, the abolition of serfdom came. But this is a whole change of eras. Like a stream, the landlord class dried up. The Manilovs or their sons became Uncle Vanya, and the knock of an axe cutting down a cherry orchard heralded a new historical period. Capitalism came, noisy as a steam locomotive and proudly towering as factory chimneys. For Chichikov, this is the same as water for a fish. Government contracts, private initiative, a universal and open love of money. But.

The state began to have a strange fever, the very thing that seemed unshakable. The official robbed for a long time with a sense of his own importance. And the peasant has been ploughing, cunning and enduring for centuries. Everyone drank a little, was a little bored, chatted a little about this and that. Suddenly there were strikes, leaflets, calls for an uprising. Some committees, parties, words about freedom. Everything was loose and white. Like the overheated boiler of a steam locomotive, the empire soon exploded. The consequences of this explosion affected the history of even the most remote countries. We are still shaken by the shock wave of that explosion, which, although weakened, having circled the Earth a hundred times, has not yet disappeared. The world has changed beyond recognition. Chichikov had to hide for a long time.

It came to light in the 20s of the last century under the NEP.

I do not know whether anyone thought of what I am about to say, but Chichikov was resurrected on the pages of the works of Ilf and Petrov. As in the beginning of "Dead Souls", at the beginning of "12 Chairs" the main character comes to the county town of N in search of adventurous and easy earnings. True, he enters on foot, and does not enter in a cart, and he has no socks under his stibblets, but this is a tribute to the noisy hard times. And so - before us is the same scoundrel who knows how to make money out of thin air. After walking through the space of the first novel, proving to everyone his ingenuity and unsinkable vitality, he appears in the second novel to fight his own double.

Mr. Koreiko from The Golden Calf is also Chichikov. He is a lover of money and a trickster, who hides under the image of a petty clerk, like Pal Ivanitch himself once, but not because he seeks to enrich himself, but because he cannot use the wealth already accumulated (read: stolen). Bender and Koreiko are connected as a body and its shadow. For example, in Alan Parker's film Angel Heart, Mickey Rourke's character is looking for himself. They meet, and the meeting does not bode well. There is no point in retelling the plot of the film and the content of the novel. Some know them, others can get acquainted with them. But in the form of a "shirt-guy" with an Odessa accent and criminal habits, Chichikov also did not manage to live long. The NEP was curtailed. Scoundrels squeezed into the apparatus (not to enrich themselves, but to survive) or went to die on the construction sites of the century against their will. Chichikov disappeared again.