Nikolai Gogol – The Government Inspector (1836)
Play – read on the iBooks app for the iPhone during June 2011
- 4 nods out of 5 -
The Government Inspector is a celebrated Russian classic, with commentators going as far as to label it ‘a national institution.’ It is both comedy and government critique, delighting audiences ever since its first performance in the mid-nineteenth century when Tsar of the time, Nicolas I, is reputed to have commented: ‘How true!’
Gogol’s play follows the misadventures of Khlestakov who is mistaken as a government inspector in a provincial town. Alarm builds in the community as everyone fears a reprisal from the Tsarist government, with the plot of play showing the locals attempts to bribe the mistaken inspector. Such bribes the unscrupulous Khlestakov eagerly accepts.
The play excels as a comedy. Despite the mistaken identity gag perhaps wearing thin towards its end, the continuing comedy of errors is a device used down to the present day in modern sitcoms, from Fawlty Towers to Fraser. In a British setting it would be easy to see John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty in the role of the town’s governor. For instance, read Gogol’s directions for this character: ‘Coarse in his judgements, he passes rapidly from fear to joy, from servility to arrogance.’ Basil Fawlty, indeed.
But it is in the play’s implicit critique of the government of the day in which it proves most important. Comments against the Tsar meant a visit to Siberia in Imperial and Soviet Russia, meaning the writers of these periods found other means to get their message to the masses, in the form of their plays and stories; something Gogol has gone down in history for. As Gogol states himself in a letter of the period:
‘I resolved to gather together all the bad in Russia I then knew into one heap, all the injustice that was practised in those places and in those human relations in which more than in anything justice is demanded of men, and to have one big laugh over it all.’
Not that it done Gogol the slightest bit of good, as he left his homeland in search of greater freedom abroad. The Government Inspector may be deemed a classic Russian work of art; however, it shades in comparison to Gogol’s much greater Lost Souls. As an introduction to Gogol, the play is ever ready to impress; but perhaps the reader should look at first to his comedic and surreal The Nose.
