Word: chichikov
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...scandal had really begun back in 1945. In that year Smith's enrollment figures suddenly began to soar, entitling Sandusky to thousands of extra dollars in state aid. Though no one suspected it at the time, Sandusky's school lists were just about as phony as Chichikov's serfs in Dead Souls. By 1950, said the investigators, Superintendent Smith was claiming state aid for 1,243 pupils, when his actual total enrollment was only 797. Last year he claimed 1,253 pupils, actually had only 785. Some of the names were fictitious; some belonged to students long...
...story concerns one Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant, who travels around Russia buying up the names of "dead souls"-serfs who have died since the last census. Once he has accumulated a large enough roster of these imaginary people, Chichikov intends to raise a huge mortgage on them, invest the money somehow or other and make himself a rich man. It is at once an uproariously funny story and a sulphuric satire on Russian society. Gogol was able to sound the deepest and most secret of men's motives as surehandedly as a peasant pawing up his potato crop...
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