The Inspector General
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The Inspector General or The Government Inspector (Russian: Ревизор) is a satirical play by the Russian playwright and novelist Nikolai Gogol, published in 1836 and revised for the 1842 edition. Based upon an anecdote allegedly recounted to Gogol by Pushkin, the play is a comedy of errors, portraying human greed, stupidity, and the deep corruption of powers in Tsarist Russia.
According to D.S. Mirsky, the play "is not only supreme in character and dialogue — it is one of the few Russian plays constructed with unerring art from beginning to end. The great originality of its plan consisted in the absence of all love interest and of sympathetic characters. The latter feature was deeply resented by Gogol's enemies, and as a satire the play gained immensely from it. There is not a wrong word or intonation from beginning to end, and the comic tensity is of a quality that even Gogol was not always at his beck and call."[1]
The dream-like scenes of the play, often mirroring each other, whirl in the endless vertigo of self-deception around the main character, Khlestakov, who impersonates the irresponsibility, the light-mindedness, the absence of measure. "He is full of meaningless movement and meaningless fermentation incarnate, on a foundation of placidly ambitious inferiority" (D.S. Mirsky). The publication of the play led to a great outcry in the reactionary press. It took the personal interference of Tsar Nicholas I to have the play staged, with Mikhail Shchepkin taking the role of the Mayor.
[edit] Plot
The top officials of a small provincial town, headed by the Mayor, react with terror to the rumors of an incognito inspector (the revizor) to be sent to their town for an undercover inspection. The flurry of activity to cover up the various misdeeds and clean up the town is interrupted by the report that a suspicious person from Saint Petersburg (at that time, the capital of Russia) has already arrived two weeks ago and is staying at the inn. That person, however, is not an inspector; it is Khlestakov, a young light-headed and ambitious office clerk from the capital who is travelling to his parents' estate and remains in the hotel simply because he ran out of money.
Blinded by their fear, unclean consciences, and deeply embedded servility, the Mayor and his retinue do not hesitate to mistake this comically insignificant dandy for the dreadful inspector. For quite some time, the pseudo-inspector does not even realize that he is mistaken for someone else; he enjoys the officials' servility, dines with them, extracts huge bribes from them, and ends up engaged with the Mayor's daughter.
Luckily for him, upon advice from his more sober servant, he flees the town (promising but not intending to return) just before the town's high society is astonished by the discovery (from an intercepted letter) of his true low rank. The Mayor himself speaks to the audience announcing that they are only laughing at themselves. While we hear the officials arguing, the play is ended with the message that the real Inspector General has arrived and wants to see the Mayor immediately, upon which the characters freeze on stage.
[edit] Meyerhold's interpretation
In 1926, the expressionistic production of the comedy by Vsevolod Meyerhold "returned to this play its true surrealistic, dreamlike essence after a century of simplistically reducing it to mere photographic realism".[2] Erast Garin interpreted Khlestakov as "an infernal, mysterious personage capable of constantly changing his appearance".[3] Leonid Grossman recalls that Garin's Khlestakov was "a character from Hoffmann's tale, slender, clad in black with a stiff mannered gait, strange spectacles, a sinister old-fashioned tall hat, a rug and a cane, apparently tormented by some private vision".
Meyerhold wrote about the play: "What is most amazing about The Inspector General is that although it contains all the elements of... plays written before it, although it was constructed according to various established dramatic premises, there can be no doubt — at least for me — that far from being the culmination of a tradition, it is the start of a new one. Although Gogol employs a number of familiar devices in the play, we suddenly realize that his treatment of them is new... The question arises of the nature of Gogol's comedy, which I would venture to describe as not so much "comedy of the absurd" but rather as "comedy of the absurd situation".[4]
In the finale of Meyerhold's production, the actors were replaced with dolls, a device that Andrei Bely compared to the stroke "of the double Cretan ax that chops off heads", but entirely justified as in this case "the archaic, coarse grotesque is more subtle than subtle".[5]
[edit] Other adaptations
The play was repeatedly filmed in the Soviet Union and Russia, first by Leonid Gaidai under the title Incognito from St. Petersburg and most recently in 1996 with Nikita Mikhalkov playing the Mayor. Neither adaptation was deemed a critical or box-office success.
The first film based on the play was actually made in German, by Gustaf Gründgens in 1932; the German title was Eine Stadt steht Kopf, or A City Stands on Its Head. In 1949, a Hollywood musical comedy version was released, starring Danny Kaye; see The Inspector General (1949 film).
Werner Egk produced an operatic version in 1957. In 2005, playwright David Farr wrote and directed a "freely adapted" version for London's National Theatre called "The UN Inspector," which transposed the action to a modern-day ex-Soviet republic. The play seems to be the clear inspiration for the "Hotel Inspector" episode of John Cleese's comedic television series Fawlty Towers.
The play has been translated in all European languages and remains popular, inasmuch as it deals with the hypocrisies of everyday life along with the corruption perpetrated by the rich and privileged. In the Netherlands, for instance, André van Duin made his own Dutch version of the play called De Boezemvriend (meaning "bosom friend", "best buddy"); it is set in the Netherlands during the Napoleonic era.
[edit] Quotes
"Alexander of Macedon was a hero, it is true. But that's no reason for breaking chairs."
"Your clever man is either a drunkard, or he makes such grimaces that you feel like running away."
[edit] References
- ^ D.S. Mirsky. A History of Russian Literature. Northwestern University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8101-1679-0. Page 161. (Public Domain).
- ^ Karlinsky, Simon. Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought. Northwestern University Press, 1997. ISBN 0810114607. Page 370.
- ^ Listengarten, Julia. Russian Tragifarce: Its Cultural and Political Roots. Susquehanna University Press, 2000. ISBN 1575910330. Page 37.
- ^ Ibidem. Page 27.
- ^ Fusso, Susanne. Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word. Northwestern University Press, 1994. ISBN 0810111918. Page 55.
