Government Inspector

Nikolaï Gogol

Description

The mayor and local officials of a small provincial town in Russia have got it made: corruption is rife and they have all the power. Yet, when they learn that an undercover government inspector is about to make a visit, they face a mad dash to cover their tracks. Soon, the news that a suspicious person has recently arrived from St Petersburg and is staying in a local inn produces a series of events and misunderstandings that lead to a hilarious denouement.ABOUT THE SERIES: Alma Classics is committed to make available the widest range of literature from around the globe. All the titles are provided with an extensive critical apparatus, extra reading material including a section of photographs and notes. The texts are based on the most authoritative edition (or collated from the most authoritative editions or manuscripts) and edited using a fresh, intelligent editorial approach. With an emphasis on the production, editorial and typographical values of a book, Alma Classics aspires to revitalize the whole experience of reading the classics.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714549941
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Government Inspector
Nikolai Gogol
Translated by Roger Cockrell


ALMA CLASSICS


Alma Classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
The Government Inspector first published in Russian in 1836 This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2019
Translation and Notes © Roger Cockrell, 2019
Cover design by Will Dady
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.


Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-815-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Introduction
The Government Inspector
Characters
Notes for the actors
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
Act Five
Note on the Text
Notes


Introduction
The idea for a new play, to be known as The Government Inspector , first came to Nikolai Gogol in 1835, some six years after he had moved from his sunny Ukrainian homeland to an inhospitable St Petersburg. Though aged only 25 he had already made a name for himself with two volumes of short stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and Mirgorod , both set in the Ukraine, and was now engaged in writing a series of stories about St Petersburg, including ‘The Nose’ and ‘Diary of a Madman’. But he had long been contemplating the purpose of drama and the state of theatre in Russia. ‘Drama comes to life only once it’s on the stage,’ he wrote to the historian and journalist Mikhail Pogodin, ‘otherwise it’s like a soul without a body’ (letter of 20 February 1833). What he had in mind was a new kind of theatre that was less dependent on trifling French vaudevilles and contrived melodramas, and purged of the artificiality and didacticism of earlier Russian comedies.
Exactly where the idea for his new play had come from is uncertain. A couple or so years earlier he had taken his first steps as a would-be dramatist with a comedy provisionally entitled The Order of Vladimir, Third Class . Conceived on a grand scale, with a complex plot and large numbers of characters, Vladimir was sharply satirical in intent, unmasking the negative aspects of St Petersburg society with its petty ambition, self-interest, vanity and servility, and reflecting his disgust with the emptiness and banality of people’s lives. Yet by the end of the second act he had given up the project, largely because of his concern that it would never have passed the censor.
The urge, nevertheless, to write a play was as powerful as ever. Working on Vladimir had provided Gogol with plenty of raw material, but he still needed an overarching plot and a coherent dramatic framework. We know that he wrote to Alexander Pushkin in October 1835 asking him to let him have ‘a theme, any theme you like, comic or serious, just so long as it’s a genuinely Russian story… So please do me a favour’, he continued, ‘give me a plot, and I’ll write a comedy in five acts; I promise it will be an absolute hoot’. But we are not certain that it was actually Pushkin who came up with the basic idea for The Government Inspector . Whether he did or not, the theme of a bogus government official would undoubtedly have been familiar to Gogol, since it had featured in a number of plays on the Russian stage in the 1820s and early 30s. In his letter to Pushkin, moreover, Gogol was probably at least as concerned to boast about his ability to create a comedy ‘out of nothing’, as to get a direct reply to his request.
Gogol wrote The Government Inspector in just a few weeks. The first performance, staged in the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in April, 1836 had a boisterous reception, with most people regarding it simply as an amusing farce. Ironically, Tsar Nicholas I was one of those in the audience who laughed the loudest. Some were more critical, accusing Gogol, among other things, of deliberately attempting to inveigle his audience into believing he was merely writing about the trifling peccadillos of an unknown provincial town, when his aim was in fact directed at the very heart of government itself. A few reactionary figures went even further; among these was a certain Count Fyodor Tolstoy who branded Gogol as ‘a criminal’ and ‘enemy of Russia’ who should be ‘sent off to Siberia in chains’.
Typically, Gogol saw such comments as proof of a general conspiracy against him. ‘Everyone is against me,’ he complained to Mikhail Shchepkin, the actor who had played the part of the Mayor that first night, ‘elderly, respectable clerks go about the place shouting that I have attacked everything that’s sacred… the merchants are against me; the literary figures are against me’ (letter of 29 April 1836). In any case he had been so upset by what he regarded as the debacle of the first night that he had fled abroad for western Europe the very next day. ‘A writer of contemporary life,’ he wrote once again to Pogodin, ‘a writer of comedy, a writer of manners must stay as far as possible from his native land’. He was above all dismayed that the public had failed to grasp the real intent of his play. ‘If people are to laugh,’ he was to write later, ‘then their laughter should be powerful and directed at that which is fully deserving of mockery. In my Government Inspector I set out to gather together everything in my experience that was bad about Russia, all the injustices committed, wherever and whenever justice is demanded and pour scorn on it all in one blow. And, as is well known, this had a particularly striking effect’ ( My Author’s Confession , 1847).
Gogol was certainly right about his play having a ‘striking effect’. He may have been unhappy about the first performance of The Government Inspector , but it was actually far from a disaster. The success of the performance of the revised version in St Petersburg in 1842 confirmed its place as a key work in the repertoire – a reputation that has only been enhanced ever since. Yet what exactly is it about The Government Inspector that raised it above the level of a run-of-the mill comedy? How did he succeed in exploiting such a simple, unoriginal plot so as to transform people’s view of the world and of themselves? Firstly, despite his perception to the contrary, there were many of his compatriots who recognized his ability to speak to the general human condition and to raise the individual into the universal. Take, for example, the play’s central plot line: the Mayor’s failure to recognize he is being duped by such an obvious charlatan. He is portrayed, right up until the penultimate scene, as yet one more stock comic figure among the rest of his entourage, meriting only ridicule. But then, in his final long speech in Act V, he launches into a blistering attack on himself for his short-sighted stupidity. Almost simultaneously, now beside himself with rage, he anticipates some ‘hack’ writing a comedy about it all, and then immediately turns the table on the audience by pointing out they’re actually laughing at themselves. This combination of epiphany, self-reference and unexpected switch of perspective, is a transformative moment in the history of Russian theatre.
Secondly, the fact that there is no single definitive interpretation of The Government Inspector is in itself an indication of Gogol’s greatness as a writer. Critical opinion has been divided. Was his intention primarily socio-political, i.e. to unmask the corruption and injustice prevalent in Nicholas I’s Russia – something incidentally that Gogol himself was later to deny, protesting that he would never have dreamed of attacking the Tsar or tsarist institutions? Or did it spring first and foremost from a moral impulse, a means to express his disgust with the banality of the world and his yearning to escape from the horror of it all – ‘there is no spark of life in the people’, he had written to his mother soon after arriving in St Petersburg, ‘… everything is suppressed, everything has become enmeshed in trivial, purposeless work, in which their lives are fruitlessly wasting away’ (letter of 30 April 1829). Or what are we to make of Vladimir Nabokov’s emphasis on Gogol’s mystical preoccupations that informed the dreamlike, not to say nightmarish qualities of the play, ‘peopled with his own incomparable goblins’? Or of Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s assertion that the banality and spiritual emptiness epitomized in the figure of Khlestakov is symptomatic of the presence of the Devil? In this latter connection we note the Charity Commissioner’s final despairing comment: ‘For the life of me I can’t understand how it could have all happened. Some unknown force seems to have clouded our minds.’
It is hardly surprising therefore that commentators have so frequently referred to Gogol as an ‘enigma’ (‘one of the strangest birds in the aviary of great writers’, as Robert A. Maguire puts it). He himself might even have been proud of the term. Although he spent his final years plunged in depression and wracked by doubt, the self-appraisal that appears in Chapter 7 of Part 1 of Dead Souls suggests there may have still been a part of him that acknowledged the significance of his place in the extraordinary pantheon of nineteenth-century Russian writers: ‘And for a long time still I am destined by mysterious powers to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, to view life in all its intensity as it rushes past me, seeing it through laughter visible to the world, and thr