21. ETC.
Among my fondest authorial aspirations has been that of pulling off the greatest literary red herring in all of literature. In this endeavor my role model would have to be Chapter X of Gogol’s Dead Souls, wherein a postmaster tells the story of one Captain Kopeikin, a soldier returned from the campaign of 1812 minus one arm and with a wooden leg and who may or may not be a figment of another fictional character’s imagination. The story, told in elaborate detail, purports to account for the mysterious identity of Chichikov, the book’s main character, a corrupt former government functionary who, in a get-rich-quick scheme, wanders the countryside purchasing “dead souls” (serfs no longer living but for whom, owing to a flawed census system, their landlords still had to pay taxes). T
