Chichikov buys a real estate

Kostanzhoglo lends Chichikov ten thousand on an IOU alone and rides with him to Khlobuyev's, where the contrast is brutal: cattle-gnawed scrub, a roofless stone house, muzhiks without a horse between them. Khlobuyev, cheerful in a torn frock-coat and boots full of holes, calls himself a pig who has started living like a pig and admits he sowed no grain at all this year. Kostanzhoglo cannot bear the sight and leaves early, warning Chichikov to look to utility and let beauty come by itself. Inside, the house is startlingly neat, with a bust of Shakespeare and a well-dressed wife and children. Chichikov buys the estate for thirty-five thousand and becomes for the first time a real landowner — which does not stop him from immediately considering how to sell the best land, mortgage the dead and skip without repaying Kostanzhoglo. Travelling on, he talks Lenitsyn into selling his dead souls, a bargain sealed when Lenitsyn's baby ruins Chichikov's new tail-coat.

The hinge of Part II. Chichikov acquires a real estate and, within a paragraph, a plan to defraud it — the clearest evidence Gogol could not make redemption stick. Khlobuyev's prodigal piety is offered as the diagnosis the novel keeps circling: not wickedness, but an incapacity to begin.