Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

Out of a great number of suppositions, shrewd in their own way, one in particular emerged at last (one feels strange even mentioning it): whether Chichikov were not Napoleon in disguise. The Britishers, now, had long been envious because, forsooth, Russia was so great and vast; why, on several occasions caricatures had been actually put out depicting a Russian talking with an Englishman; the Englishman stands there with a dog held on a rope behind him, which dog was supposed to represent Napoleon. “Look here, now,” says the Englishman, “if anything doesn’t go just right, I’ll let the dog loose on you right off.” And so now, maybe, they’d actually let Boney out from the isle of St. Helena, and so there he was now, sneaking into Russia rigged out as Chichikov, but, when you got right down to it, he wasn’t Chichikov at all. Of course, when it came to actually believing this, the bureaucrats did not believe it, yet just the same, they fell into deep thought and, as each one scrutinized this business for himself, they found that Chichikov’s face, were he to turn and stand sideways, did bear a most striking resemblance to a portrait of Napoleon. The Chief of Police, who had served in the campaign of 1812 and had seen Napoleon with his own eyes, also could not but own that the Little Corporal couldn’t possibly be of a greater height than Chichikov and that in bodily build also Napoleon wasn’t what you would call any too stout, even though you couldn’t say he was any too thin, eit...