Dead Souls (Penguin Classics) by Nikolay Gogol

Author:Nikolay Gogol [Gogol, Nikolay]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Gathering at the house of the Chief of Police, the father and benefactor of the town, a man who is already known to the reader, the officials had occasion to remark to one another that they had even lost weight as a result of these cares and anxieties. In fact, the appointment of a new Governor-General, and the receipt of documents bearing on matters of such a serious nature, and the rumours of Lord knows what kind had all left a perceptible mark on their faces, and the tail-coats on many of them had become perceptibly looser. Everyone looked haggard: the Chairman had lost weight, and the Inspector of the Medical Board had lost weight, and the Public Prosecutor had lost weight, and a certain Semyon Ivanovich, who was never called by his last name and who wore on his index finger a ring which he held out for the ladies to examine, even he had lost weight. Of course, as is the case everywhere, some could be found among them who were not of a cowardly disposition and had not lost their presence of mind, but these were precious few: only one, the Postmaster. He alone betrayed no change in his invariably unruffled temperament, and as on other such occasions, he had the habit of saying: ‘We know you, you governors-general! Maybe three or four of you will come and go, while I’ve been here thirty years already, my dear sir, sitting in the same old spot.’ To which the other officials had the habit of remarking: ‘It’s all very well for you, Sprechen-Sie-Deych Ivan Andreych; you’re in charge of postal matters, receiving and dispatching the mail. Maybe you cheat a bit by closing the office half an hour early, or by taking something extra for accepting a letter outside regular hours from a merchant who’s come late, or by forwarding some package that shouldn’t be forwarded. In such circumstances, anyone would be a saint. But just let the Devil start turning up at your elbow every day, so that even if you really don’t want to take anything, he keeps pushing it on you. Needless to say, it’s easy for you: you only have one son. But in my case, brother, God has blessed me and Praskovya Fyodorovna with such abundance – every year she gives birth, either to a Praskushka or a Petrusha;1 then, brother, you’d start singing a different tune.’ This is what the officials were saying, and whether one can in fact hold out against the Devil, it is not the author’s business to judge.

In the council which had gathered on this occasion, there was a highly conspicuous absence of that essential quality which among the common people is called horse sense. In general we have somehow not been created for representative bodies. In all our gatherings, from the peasants’ village commune2 to scholarly committees and every other conceivable kind, a pretty fair degree of chaos reigns, unless one head is present to run everything.

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