A gentleman arrives at N.

A britska rolls through the gate of a hostelry in an unnamed provincial capital, carrying a gentleman "not good looking, but not uncomely", neither fat nor thin, neither old nor young. Two muzhiks debate whether his wheel would reach Moscow. He settles into a room where cockroaches peep out "like prunes", attended by his coachman Selifan and the thick-lipped valet Petrushka, and interrogates the inn-servant about the province's officials and, with more than idle interest, about its landowners, their souls and its epidemics. He registers as Collegiate Councillor Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, landowner, on private business, then tours the town — yellow paint, washed-out signboards, saplings the newspapers call shady groves. A day of visits follows: the Governor, the Vice-Governor, the Public Prosecutor, down to the town architect, each flattered precisely. At the Governor's ball he joins the fat men rather than the thin, meets Manilov, Sobakevich and later Nozdryov, and charms the whole town.

Exposition by negation. The hero is defined entirely by what he is not — not handsome, not fat, not old — so the reader reaches the swindle with no character to measure it against. The town is installed as a working machine of mutual flattery before anything is asked of it, so the later panic reads as structural.