Arrest, mercy, and a broken page

The surviving fragment of the concluding chapter, broken in several places. Chichikov buys cloth of "Navarino smoke and flame", and in the same shop the tax-farmer Murazov collects Khlobuyev, talks him out of self-pity and sends him off collecting for a church. Meanwhile petitions swarm around a rich old lady's estate: relatives nobody had heard of, denunciations of a forged will dictated by Chichikov, evidence of the dead souls and of his customs smuggling. A gendarme comes for him. Before the Governor-General he pleads a mother he does not have, and ends clutching the Prince's boot until two gendarmes drag him to a fetid cell. Murazov wins his release on condition he leave at once, and tells him to think not of dead souls but of his own living soul. Chichikov drives out — a ruin of the former Chichikov, a building demolished with no plan yet for the new one — and the manuscript breaks off mid-sentence.

A ruin, and legible as one. The plot completes mechanically — exposure, arrest, intercession — while the real business is Murazov's two sermons, in which the novel abandons portraiture for instruction. Chichikov weeps, changes nothing, and orders a second identical coat. The manuscript breaks off mid-appeal, which is the only ending it could honestly have.