The types are as vivid, as faithful, for those who know the Russia of to-day, as when they were first introduced to an enthusiastic Russian public, in 1847.
In the pre-emancipation days, a "soul" signified a male serf.

Women were not taken account of in the periodical revisions; although the working unit, or _tyaglo_, consisted of a man, his wife, and his horse--the indispensable trinity in agricultural labors.

In the interval between revisions, a landed proprietor continued to pay taxes on all the male serfs accredited to him on the official list, births being considered as an exact offset to deaths, for the sake of convenience.

Another provision of the law was, that no one should purchase serfs without the land to which they belonged, except for the purpose of colonization.

An ingenious fraud, suggested by a combination of these two laws, forms the basis of plot for "Dead Souls." The hero, Tchitchikoff, is an official who has struggled up, cleverly but not too honestly, through the devious ways of bribe-taking, extortion, and not infrequent detection and disgrace, to a snug berth in the customs service, from which he has been ejected under conditions which render further upward flight quite out of the question.