Like so many charismatic hustlers to come into view in the century that follows - remember The Music Man? - he is about to foist a big idea on a small town. Our hero, if you’ll pardon the expression, is the remarkable Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a cashiered civil servant with a murky past. If you squint a bit, the story told in Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls has a special relevance for the present, a time of yawning inequality and ever more creative financial engineering. We speak here now not of eschatology, but of 19th-century Russia, an agrarian landscape where one of literature’s greatest salesmen, financial innovators, and, yes, con men, cuts a hilarious swath. A really creative entrepreneur, then, would just borrow against other people’s souls. People in business are sometimes accused of selling their souls.
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