Dead Souls

be­gin­ning, and not the middle, is the right start­ing point.

who is born with thou­sands, and is brought up to thou­sands, will never ac­quire a single ko­peck more, for he will have been set up with the amen­it­ies of life in ad­vance, and so never come to stand in need of any­thing. It is ne­ces­sary to be­gin from the be­gin­ning rather than from the middle; from a ko­peck rather than from a rouble; from the bot­tom rather than from the top. For only thus will a man get to know the men and con­di­tions among which his ca­reer will have to be carved.

On the con­trary, to make thou­sands hon­estly is a far more dif­fi­cult mat­ter than to make mil­lions. Mil­lions are eas­ily come by, for a mil­lion­aire has no need to re­sort to crooked ways; the way lies straight be­fore him, and he needs but to an­nex what­so­ever he comes across. No rival will spring up to op­pose him, for no rival will be suf­fi­ciently strong, and since the mil­lion­aire can op­er­ate over an ex­tens­ive ra­dius, he can bring (as I have said) two or three roubles to bear upon any­one else’s one. Con­sequently, what in­terest will he de­rive from a thou­sand roubles? Why, ten or twenty per­cent. at the least.”
“And it is bey­ond meas­ure mar­vel­lous that the whole should have star­ted from a single ko­peck.”

Yes, for every man there ex­ist cer­tain things which, in­stantly that they are said, seem to touch him more closely, more in­tim­ately, than any­thing has done be­fore.

“In all the world,” he re­peated, “you will find no joys like these, for herein man im­it­ates the God who pro­jec­ted cre­ation as the su­preme hap­pi­ness, and now de­mands of man that he, too, should act as the cre­ator of prosper­ity. Yet there are folk who call such func­tions te­di­ous!”

“That would de­pend on your­self,” replied Kostan­zho­glo with grim ab­rupt­ness and evid­ent ill-hu­mour. “You might either grow rich quickly or you might never grow rich at all. If you made up your mind to grow rich, sooner or later you would find your­self a wealthy man.”

Yet what are the ‘higher amen­it­ies of life’? What good can they do to any­one? Even if a landowner of the day sets up a lib­rary, he never looks at a single book in it, but soon re­lapses into card-play­ing—the usual pur­suit. Yet folk call me names simply be­cause I do not waste my means upon the giv­ing of din­ners

as for polit­ical eco­nomy, it is a fine thing in­deed. Just one fool sit­ting on an­other fool’s back, and flog­ging him along, even though the rider can see no fur­ther than his own nose

If cor­rup­tion must over­take the mir, it shall not be through my hands.

the sweat of thy brow shalt thou till the land.’ To quote that re­quires no great wis­dom, for the ex­per­i­ence of ages has shown us that, in the ag­ri­cul­tural call­ing, man has ever re­mained more moral, more pure, more noble than in any other.