![]() ![]() Some people were displaced from their residences and have dispersed. ![]() Some people who were notionally living in one place when the floods struck were in fact living elsewhere. The basic problem is that the government has lost track of how many people there are and where they are residing. The novel sprang to mind as I was reading a recent piece in the always informative Daily NK which described the government’s desperate attempt to conduct an ad hoc census in flood stricken North Hamgyong province. It is eventually revealed that Chichikov’s plan is use his collection of paper serfs as collateral to obtain a large loan-and then abscond. Chichikov, the fraudster, finds willing-though distrustful-sellers anxious to unload dead serfs who are now purely a tax burden, but who are suspicious of Chichikov’s motives. In Nikolai Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls, a corrupt government official turned scam artist shows up in a small Russian town and begins buying up “dead souls”-serfs who have died, but are still listed as chattel on the property tax rolls. ![]()
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