Economy as an Interface Between the Living and the Dead: Sergeant Kurilkin and Captain Kopeikin

The article examines the hypothesis about the correlation between the content of The Undertaker by Alexander Pushkin and that of the Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. The theme of both texts is not simply the question of human life and death, but how this question relates to the laws of capitalist economy. As is known, Karl Marx will define capital as dead labor, which, like a vampire, feeds on living labor. In this sense, we can talk about economy as an “interface” between life and death. In the article we are trying to show that at the pre-theoretical level, a similar conclusion was made by Pushkin and Gogol even before Marx. The undertaker Adrian Prokhorov and the adventurer Pavel Chichikov (the main characters of Pushkin’s story and Gogol’s poem) are entrepreneurs whose “business” is based on involving the dead in the process of commodity-money circulation. Within this process, both the living and the dead are of interest only as sources of value, the “salvation” of which is the sole purpose of capital. In this context, the function of two ghostly characters, Sergeant Kurilkin in The Undertaker and Captain Kopeikin in the Dead Souls becomes clear: both of them raise the question of life on the other side of value.