The history of the production of Gogol’s comedy The Government Inspector on the Russian stage and of the extraordinary stir it created has of course little to do with Gogol, the subject of these notes, but still a few words about those alien matters may be not unnecessary. As it was inevitable that simple minds would see in the play a social satire violently volleyed at the idyllic system of official corruption in Russia, one wonders what hopes the author or anybody else could have had of seeing the play performed. The censors’ committee was as blatantly a collection of cringing noodles or pompous asses as all such organizations are, and the mere fact of a writer daring to portray officers of the state otherwise than as abstract figures and symbols of superhuman virtue was a crime that sent shivers down the censors’ fat backs. That The Government Inspector happened to be the greatest play ever written in Russian (and never surpassed since) was naturally a matter infinitely remote from the committee’s mind.
But a miracle happened; a kind of miracle singularly in keeping with the physics of Gogol’s upside down world. The Supreme Censor, the One above all. Whose God-like level of being was so lofty as to be hardly mentionable by thick human tongues, the radiant, totalitarian Tsar Himself, in a fit of most unexpected glee commanded the play to be passed and staged.
It is difficult to conjecture what pleased Nicholas I in The Government Inspector. The man who a few years before had red-penciled the manuscript of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov with inane remarks suggesting the turning of that tragedy into a novel on the lines of Walter Scott, and generally was as immune to authentic literature as all rulers are (not excepting Frederic the Great or Napoleon) can hardly be suspected of having seen anything better in Gogol’s play than slapstick entertainment. On the other hand a satirical farce (if we imagine for a moment such a delusion in regard to The Government Inspector) seems unlikely to have attracted the Tsar’s priggish and humorless mind. Given that the man had brains—at least the brains of a politician—it would rather detract from their quantity to suppose that he so much enjoyed the prospect of having his vassals thoroughly shaken up as to be blind to the dangers of having the man in the street join in the imperial mirth. In fact he is reported to have remarked after the first performance: “Everybody has got his due, I most of all”; and if this report is true (which it probably is not) it would seem that the evolutionary link between criticism of corruption under a certain government and criticism of the government itself must have been apparent to the Tsar’s mind. We are left to assume that the permission to have the play staged was due to a sudden whim on the Tsar’s part, just as the appearance of such a writer as Gogol was a most unexpected impulse on the part of whatever spirit may be held responsible for the development of Russian literature in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. In signing this permission a despotic ruler was, curiously enough, injecting a most dangerous germ into the blood of Russian writers; dangerous to the idea of monarchy, dangerous to official iniquity, and dangerous—which danger is the most important of the three—to the art of literature; for Gogol’s play was misinterpreted by the civic-minded as a social protest and engendered in the fifties and sixties a seething mass of literature denouncing corruption and other social defects and an orgy of literary criticism denying the title of writer to anyone who did not devote his novel or short story to the castigation of district police-officers and moujik-thrashing squires. And ten years later the Tsar had completely forgotten the play and had not the vaguest idea who Gogol was and what he had written.
The first performance of The Government Inspector was a vile affair in regard to acting and setting, and Gogol was most bitter in his criticism of the abominable wigs and clownish clothes and gross over-acting that the theater inflicted upon his play. This started the tradition of staging The Government Inspector as a burlesque; later to this was added a background suggestive of a comédie de mœurs; so that the Twentieth Century inherited a strange concoction of extravagant Gogolian speech and dingy matter-of-fact setting—a state of affairs only solved now and then by the personality of some actor of genius. Strange, it was in the years when the written word was dead in Russia, as it has been now for a quarter of a century, that the Russian producer Meyerhold, in spite of all his distortions and additions, offered a stage version of The Government Inspector which conveyed something of the real Gogol.
Only once have I seen the play performed in a foreign language (in English) and it is not a memory I care to evoke. As to the translation of the book, there is little to choose between the Seltzer and Constance Garnett versions. Though totally lacking verbal talent, Garnett has made hers with a certain degree of care and it is thus less irritating than some of the monstrous versions of The Overcoat and Dead Souls. In a way it may be compared to Guizot’s tame translation of Hamlet. Of course, nothing has remained of Gogol’s style. The English is dry and flat, and always unbearably demure. None but an Irishman should ever try tackling Gogol. Here are some typical instances of inadequate translation (and these may be multiplied): Gogol in his remarks about the two squires, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, briefly describes them as both having plump little bellies (or, as he says in another place, “they simply must have protruding tummies—pointed little ones like pregnant women have”) which conveys the idea of small and otherwise thin and puny men—and this is most essential for producing the correct impression that Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky must convey. But Constance Garnett translates this as “both rather corpulent,” murdering Gogol. I sometimes think that these old English “translations” are remarkably similar to the so-called Thousand Pieces Execution which was popular at one time in China. The idea was to cut out from the patient’s body one tiny square bit the size of a cough lozenge, say, every five minutes or so until bit by bit (all of them selected with discrimination so as to have the patient live to the nine hundred ninety ninth piece) his whole body was delicately removed.
There are also a number of downright mistakes in that translation such as “clear soup” instead of “oatmeal soup” (which the Charity Commissioner ought to have been giving the sick at the hospital) or—and this is rather funny—a reference to one of the five or six books that the Judge had ever read in his life as “The Book of John the Mason,” which sounds like something biblical, when the text really refers to a book of adventures concerning John Mason (or attributed to him), an English diplomatist of the Sixteenth Century and Fellow of All Souls who was employed on the Continent in collecting information for the Tudor sovereigns.
The plot of The Government Inspector is as unimportant as the plots of all Gogol books.* Moreover, in the case of the play, the scheme is the common property of all playwriters: the squeezing of the last drop out of some amusing quid pro quo. It would appear that Pushkin suggested it to Gogol when he told him that while staying at an inn in Nizhni-Novgorod he was mistaken for an important official from the capital; but on the other hand, Gogol, with his head stuffed with old plays ever since his days of amateur theatricals at school (old plays translated into indifferent Russian from three or four languages), might have easily dispensed with Pushkin’s prompting. It is strange, the morbid inclination we have to derive satisfaction from the fact (generally false and always irrelevant) that a work of art is traceable to a “true story.” Is it because we begin to respect ourselves more when we learn that the writer, just like ourselves, was not clever enough to make up a story himself? Or is something added to the poor strength of our imagination when we know that a tangible fact is at the base of the “fiction” we mysteriously despise? Or taken all in all, have we here that adoration of the truth which makes little children ask the story-teller “Did it really happen?” and prevented old Tolstoy in his hyperethical stage from trespassing upon the rights of the deity and creating, as God creates, perfectly imaginary people? However that may be, some forty years after that first night a certain political émigré was desirous of having Karl Marx (whose Capital he was translating in London) know Chernyshevsky, who was a famous radical and conspirator banished to Siberia in the sixties (and one of those critics who vigorously proclaimed the coming of the “Gogolian” era in Russian literature, meaning by this euphemism, which would have horrified Gogol, the duty on the part of novelists to work solely for the improvement of social and political conditions). The political émigré returned secretly to Russia and traveled to the remote Yakoutsk region in the disguise of a Member of the Geographical Society (a nice point, this) in order to kidnap the Siberian prisoner; and his plan was thwarted owing to the fact that more and more people all along his meandering itinerary mistook him for a Government Inspector traveling incognito—exactly as had happened in Gogol’s play. This vulgar imitation of artistic fiction on the part of life is somehow more pleasing than the opposite thing.
The epigraph to the play is a Russian proverb which says “Do not chafe at the looking glass if your mug is awry.” Gogol, of course, never drew portraits—he used looking glasses and as a writer lived in his own looking glass world. Whether the reader’s face was a fright or a beauty did not matter a jot, for not only was the mirror of Gogol’s own making and with a special refraction of its own, but also the reader to whom the proverb was addressed belonged to the same Gogolian world of gooselike, pig-like, pie-like, nothing-on-earth-like facial phenomena. Even in his worst writings Gogol was always good at creating his reader, which is the privilege of great writers. Thus we have a circle, a closed family-circle, one might say. It does not open into the world. Treating the play as a social satire (the public view) or as a moral one (Gogol’s belated amendment) meant missing the point completely. The characters of The Government Inspector whether subject or not to imitation by flesh and blood, were true only in the sense that they were true creatures of Gogol’s fancy. Most conscientiously, Russia, that land of eager pupils, started at once living up to these fancies—but that was her business, not Gogol’s. In the Russia of Gogol’s day bribery flourished as beautifully as it did, and does, anywhere on the Continent—and, on the other hand, there doubtless existed far more disgusting scoundrels in any Russian town of Gogol’s time than the good-natured rogues of The Government Inspector. I have a lasting grudge against those who like their fiction to be educational or uplifting, or national, or as healthy as maple syrup and olive oil, so that is why I keep harping on this rather futile side of The Government Inspector question.
The play begins with a blinding flash of lightning and ends in a thunderclap. In fact it is wholly placed in the tense gap between the flash and the crash. There is no so-called “exposition.” Thunderbolts do not lose time explaining meteorological conditions. The whole world is one ozone-blue shiver and we are in the middle of it. The only stage tradition of his time that Gogol retained was the soliloquy, but then people do talk to themselves aloud during the nervous hush before a storm while waiting for the bang to come. The characters are nightmare people in one of those dreams when you think you have waked up while all you have done is to enter the most dreadful (most dreadful in its sham reality) region of dreams. Gogol has a peculiar manner of letting “secondary” dream characters pop out at every turn of the play (or novel, or story), to flaunt for a second their life-like existence (as that Colonel P. who passed by in Shponka’s Dream or many a creature in Dead Souls). In The Government Inspector this manner is apparent from the start in the weird private letter which the Town-Mayor Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky reads aloud to his subordinates—School Inspector Khlopov, Judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin (Mr. Slap-Dash), Charity Commissioner Zemlyanika, (Mr. Strawberry—an overripe brown strawberry wounded by the lip of a frog) and so forth. Note the nightmare names so different from, say, the sleek “Hollywood Russian” pseudonyms Vronsky, Oblonsky, Bolkonsky etc. used by Tolstoy. (The names Gogol invents are really nicknames which we surprise in the very act of turning into family names—and a metamorphosis is a thing always exciting to watch.) After reading the important part of the letter referring to the impending arrival of a governmental inspector from Petersburg the Mayor automatically continues to read aloud and his mumbling engenders remarkable secondary beings that struggle to get into the front row.
“. . . my sister Anna Kyrillovna and her husband have come to stay with us; Ivan Kyrillovich [apparently a brother, judging by the patronymic] has grown very fat and keeps playing the violin.”
The beauty of the thing is that these secondary characters will not appear on the stage later on. We all know those casual allusions at the beginning of Act I to Aunt So-and-so or to the Stranger met on the train. We all know that the “by the way” which introduces these people really means that the Stranger with the Australian accent or the Uncle with the comical hobby would have never been mentioned if they were not to breeze in a moment later. Indeed the “by the way” is generally a sure indication, the masonic sign of conventional literature, that the person alluded to will turn out to be the main character of the play. We all know that trite trick, that coy spirit haunting first acts in Scribia as well as on Broadway. A famous playwright has said (probably in a testy reply to a bore wishing to know the secrets of the craft) that if in the first act a shot gun hangs on the wall, it must go off in the last act. But Gogol’s guns hang in midair and do not go off—in fact the charm of his allusions is exactly that nothing whatever comes of them.
In giving his instructions to his subordinates in view of preparing and repairing things for the arrival of the Government Inspector, the Mayor refers to the Judge’s clerk.
“. . . a knowing fellow, I daresay, but he has such a smell coming from him—as if he had just emerged from a vodka distillery. . . . I meant to mention it to you [to the Judge] long ago but something or other kept putting it out of my head. Remedies may be found if, as he says, it is his natural odor: you might suggest to him a diet of onions or garlic, or something of that kind. In a case like this Christian Ivanovich [the silent District Doctor of German extraction] might help by supplying this or that drug.” To which the Judge retorts:
“No, it is a thing impossible to dislodge: he tells me that his wet nurse dropped him when he was a baby and that there has been a slight smell of vodka hanging about him ever since.”
“Well [says the Mayor] I just wanted to draw your attention to it, that is all.” And he turns to another official.
We shall never hear about that unfortunate clerk again, but there he is, alive, a whimsical, smelly creature of that “injured” kind over which Gogol smacked his lips.
Other secondary beings have no time to come out in full attire, so impatient are they to jump into the play between two sentences. The Mayor is now drawing the attention of the School Inspector to his assistants:
“One of them, for instance, the one with the fat face . . . can’t think of his name . . . well, every time he begins his class, he simply must make a grimace, like this [shows how] and then he starts to massage his chin from under his cravat. Of course if he makes faces only at the boys, it does not much matter—it may be even necessary in his department for all I know of those things; but consider what might happen if he did it in front of a visitor—that would be really dreadful: His Excellency the Government Inspector or anybody else might think it was meant for him. Goodness only knows what consequences that might have.”
“What on earth am I to do with him, pray? [replies the School Inspector]. I have spoken to him several times already. Only the other day when our Marshal of Nobility was about to enter the classroom he went into such facial contortions as I have never yet seen. He did not mean anything, bless his kind heart, but I got a wigging: suggesting revolutionary ideas to youth, that’s what they said.” Immediately afterwards another homunculus appears [rather like the little firm heads of witch doctors bursting out of the body of an African explorer in a famous short story]. The Mayor refers to the history teacher:
“He is a scholar, no doubt, and has acquired loads of learning, but there—he lectures with such vehemence that he loses all self-control. I happened to hear him once: so long as he was talking about the Assyrians and the Babylonians it was—well, one could stand it; but when he got to Alexander the Great, then—no, I simply can’t describe his state. Lord, I thought the house was on fire! He dashed out of his desk and banged a chair against the floor with all his might! Alexander the Great was a hero, we all know that, but is this a reason to break chairs? It is wasting Government property.”
“Ah yes, he is vehement [admits the School Inspector with a sigh] I have mentioned it to him several times. He answers: whether you like it or not, I can’t help forfeiting my own life in the cause of learning.”
The Postmaster, to whom the Mayor talks next, asking him to unseal and read the letters that pass through his office (which the good man had been doing for his own pleasure for years), is instrumental in letting out another homunculus.
“It’s a great pity [he says to the Mayor] that you don’t read those letters yourself: they contain some admirable passages. The other day for instance a lieutenant was writing to a friend and describing a ball he had been to—in a most waggish style. . . . Oh, very, very nice: ‘My life, dear friend,’ he wrote, ‘floats in empyrean bliss: lots of young ladies, band playing, banner galloping . . .’—all of it written with great, great feeling.”
Two quarrelsome country squires are mentioned next by the Judge, Cheptovich and Varkhovinsky, neighbors, who have taken proceedings against each other which will probably last all their lives (while the Judge merrily courses hares on the lands of both). Then as Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky make their dramatic appearance with the news that they have discovered the Government Inspector living incognito at the local inn, Gogol parodies his own fantastic meandering way (with gushes of seemingly irrelevant details) of telling a story: all the personal friends of Bobchinsky come bobbing up as the latter launches upon the report of his and Dobchinsky’s sensational discovery: “So I ran to see Korobkin [Mr. Box] and not finding Korobkin at home [Jack-in-the-box had left it], I called on Rastakovsky [Mr. Blankety-Blank], and not finding Rastakovsky at home . . . [of all the homunculi only these two will appear as visitors at the end of the last act by special request of the stage management].” At the inn where Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky see the person whom they wrongly suspect to be the Government Inspector they interview the inn-keeper Vlass—and here—among the gasps and splutters of Bobchinsky’s feverish speech (trying to tell it all before his double, Dobchinsky, can interrupt him) we obtain this lovely detailed information concerning Vlass (for in Gogol’s world the more a person hurries the more he loiters on the way):
“. . . and so Dobchinsky beckoned with his finger and called the inn-keeper—you know, the inn-keeper Vlass—his wife has borne him a child three weeks ago—such a smart little beggar—will keep an inn just like his father does. . . .”
Note how the newborn Anonymous Vlassovich manages to grow up and live a whole life in the space of a second. Bobchinsky’s panting speech seems to provoke an intense fermentation in the backstage world where those homunculi breed.
There are some more to come. The room where Khlestakov—the sham Government Inspector—dwells is identified by the fact that some officers who had also chanced to pass through that town some time before had a fight there over cards. One of the Mayor’s men, the policeman Prokhorov, is alluded to in the following way.
The Mayor, in blustering haste to the policeman Svistunov: “Where are the others? . . . Dear me, I had ordered Prokhorov to be here, too. Where is Prokhorov?”
The Policeman: “Prokhorov is at the police station, but he cannot be put to any good use.”
The Mayor: “How’s that?”
The Policeman: “Well, just as I say: he was brought in this morning in a carriage dead drunk. Two buckets of water have been poured over him already, but he has not come round yet.”
“But how on earth did you let him get into such a state?” the Mayor asks a moment later, and the Police Officer (incidentally called Ukhovyortov—a name which contains the idea of “viciously hitting people on the ear” all in one word) replies: “The Lord knows. There was a brawl in the suburb yesterday—he went there to settle matters and came back drunk.”
After this orgy of secondary characters surging at the close of the first act there is a certain lull in the second which introduces Khlestakov. True, a gambling infantry captain, who was great at piling up tricks, appears to the echoes of cheerful card-slapping as Khlestakov recalls the money he lost to him in the town of Pensa; but otherwise the active, ardent Khlestakov theme is too vigorous in this act (with the Mayor visiting him at the inn) to suffer any intruders. They come creeping back in the third act: Zemlyanika’s daughter, we learn, wears a blue frock—and so she floats by in between the speeches, a pink and blue provincial maiden.
When upon his arrival at the Mayor’s house Khlestakov, in the most famous scene of the Russian stage, starts showing off for the benefit of the ladies, the secondary characters that come tumbling out of his speech (for at last they had been set rolling by Khlestakov’s natural garrulousness and the Mayor’s wine) are of another race, so to speak, than those we have already met. They are of a lighter, almost transparent texture in keeping with Khlestakov’s own iridescent temperament—phantoms in the guise of civil servants, gleeful imps coming to the assistance of the versatile devil ventriloquizing through Khlestakov. Dobchinsky’s children, Vanya, Lisanka, or the inn-keeper’s boy existed somewhere or other, but these do not exist at all, as such. The allusions have become delusions. But because of the crescendo of lies on Khlestakov’s part the driving force of these metaphysical creatures is more felt in its reaction upon the course of the play than were the idyllic gambols of the little people in the background of Act I.
“Ah, Petersburg!” exclaims Khlestakov. “That is what I call life! Perhaps you think I am just a copying clerk? [which he was]. No, Sir, the head of my section is right chummy with me. Has a way, you know, of slapping me on the shoulder and saying: ‘Come and have dinner with me, old chap.’ I only look in at the office for a couple of minutes, just to tell them: ‘Do this, do that.’ And then the copying clerk, old rat, goes with his pen—trrk, trrk, scraping and scribbling away. [In long drawn accents] It was even suggested that I be made a Collegiate Assessor. [Again trippingly] But thought I to myself, what’s the use? And there is the office boy [these are bearded men in Russia] running up the stairs after me with a brush—‘Allow me, Sir,’ he says, ‘I’ll just give a bit of shining to your shoes.’” Much later we learn that the office “boy’s” name was Mikhey, and that he drank like a fish.
Further on, when, according to Khlestakov, soldiers rushed out of the guardhouse as he passed and gave the grand salute: “Their officer whom I knew very well said to me afterwards: ‘Well, well, old boy, I am damned if we did not take you for the Commander-in-Chief!’”
When he starts talking of his Bohemian and literary connections, there even appears a goblin impersonating Pushkin: “I hobnob with Pushkin. Many a time have I said to him: ‘Well, old Push, how are things going?’—‘As usual, my dear fellow,’ he says, ‘very much as usual.’ Quite a character!”
Then other bigwigs come jostling and buzzing and tumbling over each other as Khlestakov rushes on in an ecstasy of invention: Cabinet Ministers, Ambassadors, Counts, Princes, Generals, the Tsar’s Advisors, a shadow of the Tsar himself, and “Messengers, messengers, messengers, thirty-five thousand messengers,” spermatozoids of the brain—and then suddenly in a drunken hiccup they all fade; but not before a real allusion (at least real in the same sense as the little people of Act I were “real”), the ghost of needy clerk Khlestakov’s slatternly cook Mavroosha peeps out for a dreadful instant through a chink of Khlestakov’s speech in the midst of all those golden ghosts and dream ambassadors—to help him out of his skimpy overcoat (that carrick, to be exact, which later on Gogol was to immortalize as the attribute of a transcendental “chinovnik”).
In the next act, when one by one the nervous officials present their respects to Khlestakov, who borrows money from each (they think that they are bribing him) we learn the names of Zemlyanika’s children—Nicholas, Ivan, Elizabeth, Mary and Perepetuya: it was probably gentle Perepetuya who wore the pale blue frock. Of Dobchinsky’s three children, two have been mentioned already by the Mayor’s wife as being her godchildren. They and the eldest boy are uncommonly like the Judge who visits Mrs. Dobchinsky every time her poor little husband is away. The eldest boy was born before Dobchinsky married that wayward lady. Dobchinsky says to Khlestakov: “I make bold to ask your assistance in regard to a most delicate circumstance. . . . My eldest son, Sir, was born before I was married. . . . Oh, it is only a manner of speaking. I engendered him exactly as though in lawful wedlock, and made it perfectly right afterwards by sealing the bonds, Sir, of legitimate matrimony, Sir. Well, now I want him to be, in a manner of speaking, altogether my legitimate son, Sir, and to be called the same as I: Dobchinsky, Sir.” (The French “sauf votre respect,” though much too long, would perhaps better render the meaning of the humble little hiss—an abbreviation of “Soodar”—“Sir,” which Dobchinsky adds to this or that word at the fall of his sentences.)
“I would not have troubled you,” he goes on, “but I feel sorry for him, seeing his many gifts. The little fellow, you see, is something quite special—promises a lot: he can recite verses and such like things by heart, and whenever he happens to come across a penknife he makes a wee little carriage—as clever as a conjuror, Sir.”
One more character appears in the background of the act: it is when Khlestakov decides to write about those weird provincial officials to his friend Tryapichkin (Mr. Ragman) who is a sordid little journalist with mercenary and pamphleteering inclinations, a rascal with a knack of making laughing stocks of those he chooses to chastise in his cheap but vicious articles. For one instant he winks and leers over Khlestakov’s shoulder. He is the last to appear—no, not quite the last, for the ultimate phantom will be the gigantic shadow of the real Government Inspector.
This secondary world, bursting as it were through the background of the play, is Gogol’s true kingdom. It is remarkable that these sisters and husbands and children, eccentric school teachers, vodka-bewitched clerks and policemen, country squires quarreling for fifty years over the position of a fence, romantic officers who cheat at cards, wax sentimental over provincial balls and take a ghost for the Commander-in-Chief, these copying clerks and fantastic messengers—all these creatures whose lively motion constitutes the very material of the play, not only do not interfere with what theatrical managers call “action” but apparently assist the play to be eminently playable.
Not only live creatures swarm in that irrational background but numerous objects are made to play a part as important as that of the characters: the hatbox which the Mayor places upon his head instead of his hat when stamping out in official splendor and absent-minded haste to meet a threatening phantom, is a Gogolian symbol of the sham world where hats are heads, hatboxes hats, and braided collars the backbones of men. The hurried note which the Mayor sends from the inn to his wife telling her of the exalted guest whom she must get ready to receive gets mixed up with Khlestakov’s hotel bill, owing to the Mayor having used the first scrap of paper that came to hand: “I hasten to tell you, my dearest, that I was in a most sorry plight at first; but thanks to my trusting in the mercy of God 2 salted cucumbers extra and a portion of caviare, 1 rouble 25 kopeks.” This confusion is again a piece of sound logic within Gogol’s world, where the name of a fish is an outburst of divine music to the ears of gourmets, and cucumbers are metaphysical beings at least as potent as a provincial town mayor’s private deity. These cucumbers breed in Khlestakov’s eloquent description of his ideal of noble living: “On the table for instance there is a watermelon [which is but a sublimated cucumber]—not an ordinary watermelon but one that costs 700 roubles.” The watery soup “with feathers or something floating in it” [instead of golden eyelets of shimmering fat] which Khlestakov has to be content with at the inn is transformed in the speech referring to his life in the capital into a potage that comes in a pan “straight from Paris by steamer,”—the smoke of that imaginary steamer being as it were the heavenly exhalation of that imaginary soup. When Khlestakov is being made comfortable in his carriage the Mayor has a blue Persian rug brought from the store room (which is crammed with the compulsory offerings of his bearded subjects—the town merchants); Khlestakov’s valet adds to this a padding of hay—and the rug is transformed into a magic carpet on which Khlestakov makes his volatile exit backstage to the silvery sound of the horse-bells and to the coachman’s lyrical admonition to his magical steeds: “Hey you, my winged ones!” (“Hey vy, zalyotnye!” which literally means, “the ones that fly far”): Russian coachmen are apt to invent fond names for their horses—and Gogol, it may be assumed (for the benefit of those who like to know the personal experiences of writers) was to acquire a good deal of viatic lore during the endless peregrinations of his later years; and this gust of poetry, in which Khlestakov—the dreamy infantile swindler—fades out seems to blow open the gates for Gogol’s own departure from the Russia he had invented towards distant hazy climes where numberless German watering towns, Italian ruins, Parisian restaurants and Palestine’s shrines were to get mixed up in much the same way as Providence and a couple of cucumbers did in the distracted Mayor’s letter.
It is amusing to recall that this dream play, this “Government Specter,” was treated as a skit on actual conditions in Russia. It is still more amusing to think that Gogol in his first dismal effort to check those dangerous revolutionary allusions to his play pointed out that there was at least one positive character in it: Laughter. The truth is that the play is not a “comedy” at all, just as Shakespeare’s dream-plays Hamlet or Lear cannot be called “tragedies.” A bad play is more apt to be good comedy or good tragedy than the incredibly complicated creations of such men as Shakespeare or Gogol. In this sense Molière’s stuff (for what it is worth) is “comedy” i. e. something as readily assimilated as a hot dog at a football game, something of one dimension and absolutely devoid of the huge, seething, prodigiously poetic background that makes true drama. And in the same sense O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (for what that is worth) is, I suppose, a “tragedy.”
Gogol’s play is poetry in action, and by poetry I mean the mysteries of the irrational as perceived through rational words. True poetry of that kind provokes—not laughter and not tears—but a radiant smile of perfect satisfaction, a purr of beatitude—and a writer may well be proud of himself if he can make his readers, or more exactly some of his readers, smile and purr that way.
Khlestakov’s very name is a stroke of genius, for it conveys to the Russian reader an effect of lightness and rashness, a prattling tongue, the swish of a slim walking cane, the slapping sound of playing cards, the braggadocio of a nincompoop and the dashing ways of a lady-killer (minus the capacity for completing this or any other action). He flutters through the play as indifferent to a full comprehension of the stir he creates, as he is eager to grab the benefits that luck is offering him. He is a gentle soul, a dreamer in his own way, and a certain sham charm hangs about him, the grace of a petit-maître that affords the ladies a refined pleasure as being in contrast with the boorish ways of the burly town worthies. He is utterly and deliciously vulgar, and the ladies are vulgar, and the worthies are vulgar—in fact the whole play is (somewhat like Madame Bovary) composed by blending in a special way different aspects of vulgarity so that the prodigious artistic merit of the final result is due (as with all masterpieces) not to what is said but to how it is said—to the dazzling combinations of drab parts. As in the scaling of insects the wonderful color effect may be due not to the pigment of the scales but to their position and refractive power, so Gogol’s genius deals not in the intrinsic qualities of computable chemical matter (the “real life” of literary critics) but in the mimetic capacities of the physical phenomena produced by almost intangible particles of recreated life. I have employed the term “vulgarity” for lack of a more precise one; so Pushkin in Eugene Onegin inserted the English word “vulgar” with apologies for not finding in the Russian language its exact counterpart.
The charges directed against The Government Inspector by resentful people who saw in it an insidious attack against Russian officialdom had a disastrous effect upon Gogol. It may be said to have been the starting point of the persecution mania that in various forms afflicted him to the very end of his life. The position was rather curious: fame, in its most sensational form, had come to him; the Court was applauding his play with almost vicious glee; the stuffed shirts of high officialdom were losing their stuffing as they moved uneasily in their orchestra seats; disreputable critics were discharging stale venom; such critics whose opinion was worth something were lauding Gogol to the stars for what they thought was a great satire; the popular playwright Kukolnik shrugged his shoulders and said the play was nothing but a silly farce; young people repeated with gusto its best jokes and discovered Khlestakovs and Skvosnik-Dmukhanovskys among their acquaintances. Another man would have reveled in this atmosphere of praise and scandal. Pushkin would have merely shown his gleaming Negro teeth in a good-natured laugh—and turned to the unfinished manuscript of his current masterpiece. Gogol did what he had done after the Kuechelgarten fiasco: he fled, or rather slithered, to foreign lands.
He did something else, too. In fact he did the worst thing that a writer could do under the circumstances: he started explaining in print such points of his play as his critics had either missed or directed against him. Gogol, being Gogol and living in a looking-glass world, had a knack of thoroughly planning his works after he had written and published them. This system he applied to The Government Inspector. He appended a kind of epilogue to it in which he explained that the real Government Inspector who looms at the end of the last act is the Conscience of Man. And that the other characters are the Passions in our Souls. In other words one was supposed to believe that these Passions were symbolized by grotesque and corrupt provincial officials and that the higher Conscience was symbolized by the Government. This explanation has the same depressing effect as his later considerations of related subjects have—unless we can believe that he was pulling his reader’s leg—or his own. Viewed as a plain statement we have here the incredible fact of a writer totally misunderstanding and distorting the sense of his own work. He did the same to Dead Souls, as will be seen.
He was a strange sick creature—and I am not sure that his explanation of The Government Inspector is not the kind of deceit that is practiced by madmen. It is difficult to accept the notion that what distressed him so dreadfully about the reception of his play was his failure to be recognized as a prophet, a teacher, a lover of mankind (giving mankind a warming for its own good). There is not a speck of didacticism in the play and it is inconceivable that the author could be unaware of this; but as I say, he was given to dreaming things into his books long after they had been written. On the other hand the kind of lesson which critics—quite wrongly—discerned in the play was a social and almost revolutionary one which was highly distasteful to Gogol. He may have been apprehensive of the Court suddenly changing its august and fickle mind owing to the too violent praise in radical circles and to the too violent blame in reactionary ones—and thus cutting short the performances and profits (and a future pension maybe). He may have seen his literary career in Russia hampered for years to come by vigilant censors. He may too have been shocked and hurt by the fact that people whom he respected as good Christians (though the “good Christian” theme in its full form was to appear somewhat later) and good officials (which was to become synonymous with the first) were grieved and revolted by what they termed a “coarse and trivial farce.” But what seems to have tormented him above all was the knowledge of being talked about by thousands of people and not being able to hear, let alone control, the talk. The buzz that reached him was ominous and monstrous because it was a buzz. The pats he received on his back seemed to him to imply ironic sneers directed at people whom he respected, so that these sneers were also directed at himself. The interest that perfect strangers showed in regard to him seemed alive with dark stratagems and incalculable dangers (beautiful word, stratagem—a treasure in a cave). I shall have occasion to speak in quite a different book of a lunatic who constantly felt that all the parts of the landscape and movements of inanimate objects were a complex code of allusion to his own being, so that the whole universe seemed to him to be conversing about him by means of signs. Something of that sinister and almost cosmic dumb-show can be inferred from the morbid view Gogol took of his sudden celebrity. He fancied a hostile Russia creeping and whispering all around him and trying to destroy him both by blaming and praising his play. In June, 1836, he left for Western Europe.
It is said that on the eve of his departure Pushkin, whom he was never to see again, visited him and spent all night rummaging together with him among his manuscripts and reading the beginning of Dead Souls, a first draft of which had already been made by Gogol about that time. The picture is pleasing—too pleasing perhaps to be true. For some reason or other (possibly from a morbid dislike of any responsibility) Gogol in after years was most anxious to have people believe that all he had written before 1837, that is, before Pushkin’s death, had been directly due to the latter’s suggestion and influence. As Gogol’s art was as far removed from that of Pushkin as could be and as moreover Pushkin had other problems to tackle than guiding the pen of a literary acquaintance, the information so readily supplied by Gogol himself is hardly worth serious consideration. The lone candle lighting up the midnight scene may go out without any qualms on our part. What is far more likely is that Gogol stole abroad without bidding farewell to any of his friends. We know from a letter of his that he did not even say good-bye to Zhukovsky with whom he was on much more intimate terms than with Pushkin.
* See page 153 of “Commentaries” for a summary of the plot.