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Drama. Fiction. Humor (Fiction.) HTML: Although it may read to modern audiences like a hilarious slapstick comedy, The Inspector-General is actually much more than that. Famed Russian writer Nikolai Gogol intended it to be a veiled but pointed satire of the ineptitude, corruption, and greed that exemplified the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. The witty play was later used as the basis for a movie version starring Danny Kaye (1949)..
User reviews
LibraryThing member 391
The Government Inspector is a short, fast-paced satirical farce. I felt like it lacked some of Gogol's habitual mystic insanity, but as a comedy it fits neatly into the vein of its contemporaries.
LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
Brilliant comedy by one of the masters of Russian lit. Pokes fun at mistaken identities and foolishness of Imperial Russian society.
LibraryThing member AlanWPowers
I taught Gogol's Dead Souls a few times, but have just re-read this, a book I bought at a Princeton postdoc seminar in 1978, with the noted Russian scholar Kathryn Szczepanska (Hunter Coll) in it.
Gogol's comedy satirizes the ranks of Czarist government, where a “federal” inspector is rumored to
In the last page the Police Chief recognizes he has made a complete fool of himself, but blames the tattling young Whiper-Snapper who “skims along the road with his bells jingling! He’ll spread the story all over the earth!” Gogol’s Chichikov in Dead Souls, six years later, travels the vast country in a tax scam, amassing peasants and wealth from illiterates. (Other traveller-satirists: Faulkner’s Ratliffe in his trilogy, as well as Tom Sawyer.) The Police Chief, on his rung in the top-down government, compares the young tale-teller to journalists, “You quill-drivers, you damned Liberals! you devil’s breed”(230).
Talk about continuing relevance. And get this: Gogol is from Ukraine, where the college he attended now bears his name, a Nizhyn Gogol State University. If Manaford had been studying Gogol in Ukraine, I would be his chief supporter; but curiously, “plus ça change” Putin’s Russia has the same top-down hierarchy of Czarist, and even Soviet Russia.
Wonderfully, as the Police Chief’s wife looks forward to the Capital City, she anticipates “all sorts of delicate soups” and I was told decades ago that beside blintzes, Russian cuisine has only two high points, bread and soup. In fact, in first year Russian we were taught, ordering food, to order soup: Я хочу супу (soupu).
When deciding how to bribe the young Inspector, direct money may be frowned on, so “how about an offering from the nobility for a monument of some kind?” Then the Postmaster offers, “here is some money left unclaimed at the Post Office”(199). Think of the US fight over Confederate monuments today, and of course the tearing down of Soviet monuments by Eastern European cities free from Moscow’s yoke—for how much longer?
The issue of memorializing Confederate White Supremacy brings us to the caution that Gogol, as arguably Shakespeare, assumes a casual anti-Semitism. Probably both derive from ignorance, having met precious few Jews—whom I must add, have formed most of my lifelong friends. Additionally, with Gogol, a comic master has to build on common assumptions. (Occasionally Gogol contradicts himself on this, noting that the anti-Police Chief complaints issue from the illiterate businessmen, who are Jews. Even the anti-Semitic would admit Jews are enviably literate.)
In one last 21st C US parallel, Gogol was converted by an Elder, to see his comic writing as sin. He burned most of the MS to his Dead Souls, part 2 (Purgatory, on the model of Dante's Divina Commedia.) The house where he burned his MS still stands, in Moscow.
And like Griboyedov, Gogol died young, only eight years older, at 42, largely of self-induced ascetic malnourishment.
Gogol's comedy satirizes the ranks of Czarist government, where a “federal” inspector is rumored to
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be looking into this rural town, and the fearful residents seize on a slim college-age gambler passing through as the great authority because he exhibits classy manners from St Petersburg. Hilarious because so precisely observed from life: the “types,” first, the unimaginative Superintendent of Schools, Luka; 2) the Judge, named “Bungle-Steal,” who has read six books, a bit of a Freethinker, who lets the courtroom janitors raise geese in his court;3) the Town Manager/ Police Chief, center of the play, takes bribes (of course, but he asserts mostly hunting dog puppies) and worries about complaints; 4) the simple Postmaster, who opens every letter, out of traditional curiosity and caution; and 5) the Supervisor of Charitable Institutions (the hospital and prison), corpulent and awkward, but still a schemer. Lower on the hierarchy of power, Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, Bobchinsky and Dubchinsky, both fat gesticulators; various functionaries and cops, like the one who’s sent into the suburbs to break up a fight, and comes back near sunrise drunk. Boozing or alcoholism features as a running theme, along with Bribery or Corruption. In the last page the Police Chief recognizes he has made a complete fool of himself, but blames the tattling young Whiper-Snapper who “skims along the road with his bells jingling! He’ll spread the story all over the earth!” Gogol’s Chichikov in Dead Souls, six years later, travels the vast country in a tax scam, amassing peasants and wealth from illiterates. (Other traveller-satirists: Faulkner’s Ratliffe in his trilogy, as well as Tom Sawyer.) The Police Chief, on his rung in the top-down government, compares the young tale-teller to journalists, “You quill-drivers, you damned Liberals! you devil’s breed”(230).
Talk about continuing relevance. And get this: Gogol is from Ukraine, where the college he attended now bears his name, a Nizhyn Gogol State University. If Manaford had been studying Gogol in Ukraine, I would be his chief supporter; but curiously, “plus ça change” Putin’s Russia has the same top-down hierarchy of Czarist, and even Soviet Russia.
Wonderfully, as the Police Chief’s wife looks forward to the Capital City, she anticipates “all sorts of delicate soups” and I was told decades ago that beside blintzes, Russian cuisine has only two high points, bread and soup. In fact, in first year Russian we were taught, ordering food, to order soup: Я хочу супу (soupu).
When deciding how to bribe the young Inspector, direct money may be frowned on, so “how about an offering from the nobility for a monument of some kind?” Then the Postmaster offers, “here is some money left unclaimed at the Post Office”(199). Think of the US fight over Confederate monuments today, and of course the tearing down of Soviet monuments by Eastern European cities free from Moscow’s yoke—for how much longer?
The issue of memorializing Confederate White Supremacy brings us to the caution that Gogol, as arguably Shakespeare, assumes a casual anti-Semitism. Probably both derive from ignorance, having met precious few Jews—whom I must add, have formed most of my lifelong friends. Additionally, with Gogol, a comic master has to build on common assumptions. (Occasionally Gogol contradicts himself on this, noting that the anti-Police Chief complaints issue from the illiterate businessmen, who are Jews. Even the anti-Semitic would admit Jews are enviably literate.)
In one last 21st C US parallel, Gogol was converted by an Elder, to see his comic writing as sin. He burned most of the MS to his Dead Souls, part 2 (Purgatory, on the model of Dante's Divina Commedia.) The house where he burned his MS still stands, in Moscow.
And like Griboyedov, Gogol died young, only eight years older, at 42, largely of self-induced ascetic malnourishment.
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Awards
Language
Original language
Russian
Original publication date
1836
2014 (English translation)
Other editions
La Revizoro : komedio en kvin aktoj by N.V. Gogol (Paper Book)
La Revizoro by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol (Book)