Gluttony is to Chichikov as anger is to Achilles: the ethic of his epic. He arrives at the nameless town’s inn with “a roast chicken wrapped in blue paper,” which a servant carries in after him like a bridal train. Cabbage, brains, pickles and puff pastry follow in the dining room, dished out by a timid floor boy who also furnishes a menu of marks: local grandees with large estates and many serfs. The next morning, he rouses his coachman and embarks.

A disaster capitalist avant la lettre, Chichikov circles the province like a hungry buzzard. He scours the papers for news of fire, famine or epidemic — anything that might yield a bumper crop of souls in legal limbo. His spree has an almost gustatory zest; as one gentleman exclaims amid tense negotiations, “Really, for you a human soul is the same as a stewed turnip.”

If the archetypal trickster is an operator, his game a stylish arithmetic of self-multiplication, Chichikov is more like a human zero. Depending on the situation, he can act as flatterer, sober man of business, pious patriot, bon vivant or bully. A man without qualities, he congeals on the first page from a fog of narratorial ambivalence: “In the britzka [carriage] sat a gentleman, not handsome, but also not bad-looking, neither too fat nor too thin; you could not have said he was old, yet neither was he all that young.” Vladimir Nabokov’s book on Gogol describes the character more pithily: He is “a soap bubble blown by the devil.”

The brilliance of Gogol’s humor is the way it seizes not on excess but on emptiness. There are, to be sure, the usual “types” of social satire. Chichikov does business with a frightened widow; a miserly hoarder who picks through his own serfs’ garbage; a violent, egotistic gambling addict; a kissy young couple who read English Romantic poetry while their estate goes to ruin. Wrath, sloth, cowardice and pride all have seats at “Dead Souls”’s picaresque buffet. But animating them is a force that often eludes the caricaturist’s pen: quiet, patient, determined and “decent” greed.

Chichikov does have one definitive feature: He is “an acquirer.” The most cherished item in his possession is a writing box where he keeps the ledger of his spectral peasants. Opening it in what is perhaps his only moment of passion, he rhapsodically daydreams about their lives and deaths, revealing a narrative impulse that also colors his back story. Chichikov was once an official in the customs department, so thorough that his superiors considered him “a devil, not a man: He found things in wheels, shafts, horses’ ears and all sorts of other places where no author would even dream of going, and where no one but customs officials are allowed to go.”

Or at least no author but Gogol. He cleverly implies that his own sensibility — playful, minutely observant, ticklishly alert to life’s “terrible, stupendous mire of trivia” — is exactly what’s needed to detect a swindler like Chichikov. His macabre enterprise, so dependent on the landowners’ self-interested incuriosity, disintegrates under Gogol’s exuberant scrutiny. His metaphors evolve so ceaselessly as to beget miniature scenes: If the face of a passer-by resembles a Moldavian gourd, then before the sentence is out, that gourd has been cut and strung into a balalaika, played by a “snappy 20-year-old lad” for an audience of “whitenecked lasses.” Or, at a party of provincial bigwigs, men in black tie bustle about “as flies dart about a gleaming white sugar loaf in the hot summertime of July.” Humor, like a fly’s multifaceted eye, grants second sight.

The townspeople, in contrast, are blinded by melodrama. When they discover Chichikov’s doings, they cannot believe the pettiness of his motivation, and decide there must be some more profound reason for his activities. They speculate that he might be a kidnapper after the governor’s daughter, or even the escaped Napoleon in disguise — anything but an inconspicuous crook with nothing but money in mind. Like the millions of Americans who prefer lurid conspiracy theories to the boring details of corruption and greed, they fail to imagine his lack of imagination; or, as Gogol admonishes his readers, “You would prefer not to see human poverty revealed!”