The Government Inspector, by Nikolai Gogol, has also been translated into English under the titles The Inspector General, and The Inspector. The written play was brought to the attention of the Tsar Nicholas I, who liked it so much that he insisted on its production. The Government Inspector premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, in Saint Petersburg, in 1836. The tsar, who was among the first to see the play, was said to have commented that the play ridiculed everyone —most of all himself.
The plot of The Government Inspector hinges on a case of mistaken identity, when a lowly impoverished young civil servant from Saint Petersburg, Hlestakov, is mistaken by the members of a small provincial town for a high-ranking government inspector. The town's governor, as well as the leading government officials, fear the consequences of a visit by a government inspector, should he observe the extent of their corruption. Hlestakov makes the most of this misconception, weaving elaborate tales of his life as a high-ranking government official and accepting generous bribes from the town officials. After insincerely proposing to the governor's daughter, Hlestakov flees before his true identity is discovered. The townspeople do not discover their mistake until after he is long gone and moments before the announcement of the arrival of the real government inspector.
The Government Inspector ridicules the extensive bureaucracy of the Russian government under the tsar as a thoroughly corrupt system. Universal themes of human corruption and the folly of self-deception are explored through this drama of Russian life. The governor's famous line, as he turns to address the audience directly, ‘‘What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves,’’ illustrates this theme, which is summed up in the play's epigraph, ‘‘If your face is crooked, don't blame the mirror.’’ The Government Inspector Summary
Act 1 The play is set in a small town in provincial Russia, in the 1830s. Act 1 takes place in a room in the governor's house. The governor has called together the town's leading officials—including the judge, the superintendent of schools, the director of charities, the town doctor, and a local police officer—to inform them that a government inspector is due to arrive from Saint Petersburg. The governor explains that this government inspector is to arrive ‘‘incognito’’ with ‘‘secret instructions’’ to assess the local government and administration of the town. The governor, in a panic, instructs his officials to quickly cover up the many unethical practices and general corruption of the local town authorities. The brothers Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, two local landowners, rush in to inform the governor and his officials that they have seen the government inspector staying at the local inn. As the governor is leaving to greet the ‘‘Very Important Person’’ at the inn, his wife and his daughter, Marya, enter, asking about the inspector.
Act 2 Act 2 takes place in Hlestakov's room at the inn. Ossip, the middle-age servant of Hlestakov, muses that his master, a young man of about twenty-three years, is a government clerk of the lowest rank, who has lost all of his money gambling, and is unable to pay his bill for two weeks' food and lodging at the inn. The governor enters, assuming that Hlestakov is indeed the government inspector. He offers to show Hlestakov the local institutions, such as the prison, whereupon Hlestakov thinks he is being arrested for not paying his bill. The confusion... »
The Government InspectorWikipedia
Book
See all
People you may know
Deejay Primiér .
16 mutual friendsAfshon Wallace, Carolyne Kisero and 14 others are mutual friends.
Add as a friend
View all
Recommended Pages
Crazy Nairobian
Ben Weya and 38 other friends like him.
Like
Create an advert
Sponsored
Qatar2022Bid
Support Qatar's bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup™ and bring the game to the Middle East for the first time ever! Like · Shizzy Kate likes this.
Buy and Sell Online! dealfish.co.ke
Dealfish is Kenya's trusted online marketplace for new and used cars, property sales, rentals, jobs, electronics, travel and more...
Free Google SMS google.com
Send SMS text messages right from your Gmail to your friend's mobile phone. Your friend can reply back directly to your Gmail. Try now!
The 1st phone on Facebook
THE Social Network Phone-Free activation and free calls to your friends on Facebook platform. Free mobile calls if invite your friends!
Ben Weya used this.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia
View on Wikipedia · Edit The Government Inspector From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For the television drama of the same name, see The Government Inspector (television drama).
Cover of the first edition
The Government Inspector, also known as The Inspector General (Russian: Ревизор or Revizor or in German Der Revisor), is a satirical play by the Russophone Ukrainian playwright and novelist Nikolai Gogol. Originally published in 1836, the play was revised for an 1842 edition. Based upon an anecdote allegedly recounted to Gogol by Pushkin, the play is a comedy of errors, satirizing human greed, stupidity, and the extensive political corruption of Imperial 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 tension is of a quality that even Gogol did not always have at his beck and call." 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 personifies irresponsibility, light- mindedness, 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 intervention of Tsar Nicholas I to have the play staged, with Mikhail Shchepkin taking the role of the Mayor. Contents
• 1 Background • 2 Plot summary • 3 Meyerhold's interpretation • 4 Other adaptations • 5 Operatic versions • 6 See also • 7 References
• 8 External links [edit] Background
Early in his career Gogol was famous for his short stories, which earned him the admiration of the Russian literary circle, including Alexander Pushkin. After establishing a reputation, Gogol began working on several plays. His first attempt to write a satirical play about imperial bureaucracy in 1832 was abandoned out of fear of censorship. In 1835, he sought inspiration for a new satirical play from Pushkin.
Do me a favor; send me some subject, comical or not, but an authentically Russian anecdote. My hand is itching to write a comedy... Give me a subject and I'll knock off a comedy in five acts — I promise, funnier than hell. For God's sake, do it. My mind and stomach are both famished.
—Letter from Gogol to Pushkin, October 7, 1835
Pushkin had a storied background and was once mistaken for a government inspector in 1833. His notes alluded to an anecdote distinctly similar to what would become the basic story elements for Revizor.
Krispin arrives in the Province ... to a fair – he is taken for [illegible] ... . The governor is an honest fool – the governor's wife flirts with him – Krispin woos the daughter.
—Pushkin, Full collected works, volume 8, book 1 [edit] Plot summary
The corrupt officials of a small Russian town, headed by the Mayor, react with terror to the news that an incognito inspector (the revizor) will soon be arriving in their town to investigate them. The flurry of activity to cover up their considerable misdeeds is interrupted by the report that a suspicious person has arrived two weeks previously from Saint Petersburg and is staying at the inn. That person, however, is not an inspector; it is Khlestakov, a foppish civil servant with a wild imagination.
Having learned that Khlestakov has been charging his considerable hotel bill to the Crown, the Mayor and his crooked cronies are immediately certain that this upper class twit is the dreaded inspector. For quite some time, however, Khlestakov does not even realize that he has been mistaken for someone else. Meanwhile, he enjoys the officials' terrified deference and moves in as a guest in the Mayor's house. He also demands and receives massive "loans" from the Mayor and all of his associates. He also flirts outrageously with the Mayor's wife and daughter.
Sick and tired of the Mayor's ludicrous demands for bribes, the village's Jewish and Old Believer merchants arrive, begging Khlestakov to have him dismissed from his post. Stunned at the Mayor's rapacious corruption, Khlestakov states that he deserves to be exiled in chains to Siberia. Then, however, he pockets still more "loans" from the merchants, promising to comply with their request.
Terrified that he is now undone, the Mayor pleads with Khlestakov not to have him arrested, only to learn that the latter has become engaged to his daughter. At which point Khlestakov announces that he is returning to St. Petersburg, having been persuaded by his valet that it is too dangerous to continue the charade any longer.
After Khlestakov and his valet depart on a coach driven by the village's fastest horses, the Mayor's friends all arrive to congratulate him. Certain that he now has the upper hand, he summons the merchants, boasting of his daughter's engagement and vowing to squeeze them for every kopeck they are worth. However, the Postmaster suddenly arrives carrying an intercepted letter which reveals Khlestakov's true identity—and his mocking opinion of them all.
The Mayor, after years of bamboozling Governors and shaking down criminals of every description, is enraged to have been thus humiliated. He screams at his cronies, stating that they, not himself, are to blame. While they continue arguing, a message arrives from the real Government Inspector, who is demanding to see the Mayor immediately. [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".Erast Garin interpreted Khlestakov as "an infernal, mysterious personage capable of constantly changing his appearance".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 Government Inspector 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.'"
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 a stroke entirely justified in this case since "the archaic, coarse grotesque is more subtle than subtle." [edit] Other adaptations
The play was repeatedly filmed in the Soviet Union and Russia, first in 1977 by Leonid Gaidai under the title Incognito from Petersburg and most recently in 1996 with Nikita Mikhalkov playing the Mayor. Neither adaptation was deemed a critical or box-office success.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky played the postmaster Shpekin in a charity performance with proceeds going to the Society for Aid to Needy Writers and Scholars in April 1860.
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. The film bears only passing resemblance to the original play. Kaye's version sets the story in Napoleon's empire, instead of Russia, and the main character presented to be the ersatz inspector general is not a haughty young government bureaucrat, but a down-and-out illiterate, run out of a gypsy's travelling medicine show for not being greedy and deceptive enough. This effectively destroys much of the foundation of Gogol's work by changing the relationship between the false inspector general and members of the town's upper class.
The 1955 Indonesian film "Tamu Agung" (The Exalted Guest), directed by Usmar Ismail, is a loose adaptation of Gogol's play. The story is set in a small village in the island of Java, shortly after the nation's independence. While not strictly a musical like its Hollywood counterpart, there are several musical numbers in the film.
In 1958 the comedian Tony Hancock appeared in a live TV version on BBC Television in the part of Khlestakov, one of his few performances outside situation comedy. This was recorded at the time on movie film but has not been made available for public showing. In Italy, in 1962 Luigi Zampa directed the film Anni ruggenti (starring Nino Manfredi), a free adaptation of the play, in which the story is transposed to a small town of South Italy, during the years of Fascism.
In México, in 1974 Alfonso Arau directed and co-wrote an adaptation in film called Calzonzin Inspector, using the political cartoonist/writer Rius's characters.
In the Netherlands, a movie version was released in 1982, De Boezemvriend (The Bosomfriend) starring André van Duin. This was a musical comedy, in which an initerant dentist in the French- occupied Netherlands is taken for a French tax inspector.
The 1981 Taiwanese/Hong Kong move "If I Were For Real" is an adaptation of the Government Inspector set in the Cultural Revolution.
In 1992, Tony-winning Broadway director Daniel Sullivan collaborated with the Seattle Repertory Company to write the Gogol-inspired "Inspecting Carol", which the Western Washington Center for the Arts described as "A Christmas Carol meets Noises Off meets Waiting for Guffman. A man auditioning at a small theatre is mistaken for an informer for the National Endowment for the Arts. As the cast and crew cater to his every whim, they also turn the traditional tale of A Christmas Carol on its head."
The children's TV show Wishbone adapted the story for an episode.
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.
In 2006, Greene Shoots Theatre [1] performed an ensemble-style adaptation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Directed by Steph Gunary (nee Kirton), the acting used physical theatre, mime, and chorus work that underpinned the physical comedy. The application of Commedia dell'arte- style characterisation both heightened the grotesque and sharpened the satire.
In 2007, the integrated group of the Nottingham Youth Theatre presented a comedy version, in which there were modern songs, and the setting was Snottinggrad, a fictional Russian town. The show was revived for one night in May 2008.
In 2008, Jeffrey Hatcher adapted the play for a summer run at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. A slightly revised version of that adaptation plays at Milwaukee Repertory Theater in September 2009. St. Charles Preparatory School in Columbus, Ohio also staged a slightly revised version of Hatcher's adaptation in February 2010.
In its 2009/2010 season, the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama will present a new "modern" adaptation of The Government Inspector by Dr. Michael Chemers and directed by Jed Allen Harris. The Fawlty Towers Episode, The Hotel Inspector, can be seen to have borrowed inspiration from the original play.
In 2010, Vivid Theatre Company performed a new adaptation of the play by Andrew Berriman and Colleen Campbell which toured the North East of England.