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Khlestakov as Representative of Petersburg in The Inspector General
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Duffield White Khlestakov as Representative of Petersburg in The Inspector General • "What are you laughing at? You're laughing at yourselves!" HOW DO WE "laugh at ourselves" when we experience GogoI's Inspector General? In the commentary on the play that he wrote soon after its first performance in lS36, "Leaving the Theater after the Performance of a New Comedy," Gogol suggested that comedy should create such an all-inclusive collective sense of life on stage that the audience will feel included, implicated in what it laughs at: "Comedy should cohere spontaneously, in all its mass, into one great, inclusive knot. The plot should embrace all the characters, not one or two-and touch upon the things that stir all of them, to whatever degree" (V:142).1 Gogol noted that he had not found this ideal model of comedy embodied in any recent works of Russian or European drama, but that the classical model of Aristophanes' comedies had been an inspiration to him (V:143/1S1). In 1925 Viacheslav Ivanov wrote an article that follows this lead and compares The Inspector General to the Old Comedy of Aristophanes: Its similarity to the Old Comedy of the fifth century ... is that its action is not limited to a circle of personal relationships, but, rather, presents these relationships as components of a collective life and embraces a whole social microcosm, self-contained and self-sufficient, which stands symbolically for any social confederation, and of course reflects, as in a mirror, just that social confederation to whose entertainment and edification the comic action is directed. (As the epigraph to The Inspector General has it: "There's no use grumbling at the mirror if your own mug is crooked. ")2 While Ivanov's article powerfully asserts the spirit of Aristophanic comedy as an abstract ideal, Iurii Mann's Komediia Gogolia "Revizor" (GogoI's Comedy "The Inspector General") makes the convincing case that this ideal model is in fact embodied in GogoI's 89 Duffield White play. Mann shows how Aristophanes' model of comedy is consistent with GogoI's idealist philosophical thoughts about the role of the artist in cultural history. He suggests that when Gogol commented on the contemporary significance of Briullov's painting "The Last Day of Pompeii," he may have been identifying for himself both the nature of the cultural crisis that it was his role as artist to resolve in his art and the outline of a method for achieving this resolution: "The basic idea [of Briullov's "The Last Day of Pompeii") is in keeping with the taste of our age, which generally, as if aware of its terrible fragmentation, strives to gather all phenomena together into general groups and selects powerful crises which are felt by the whole mass of society."3 According to Mann, Gogol conceived of fragmentation or alienation as the condition of modern Russian history, which he, as an artist, was obliged to transform into an ideal experience of collective unity. This condition was expressed by Gogol in a number of striking images, such as, "It's as if an enormous carriage has arrived at an inn, and each passenger, who has spent the whole long journey closed up in himself, enters into the common room only because there's nowhere else to go" (Mann, p. 12). Mann notes that Gogol might have chosen to represent the alienation and fragmentation of contemporary society directly by choosing a form of artistic expression that was also fragmented, but instead, "the more heavily burdened he became with his vision of the fragmentation of life, the more he spoke of the need for a broad synthesis in art" (p. 13). GogoI's first move in this direction was to conceive of Russian society in the synthesizing, collective image of a sbornyi gorod (composite town). In contrast to the settings ofearlier satires on provincial town officials by Russian playwrights, this "composite town" of The Inspector General is based upon "a striving to embrace maximally all aspects of the life of society and of government" (Mann, p. 19). It includes, in a pyramidal structure, virtually all of Russia's social estates : the peasants like Khlestakov's servant, Osip, and the mayor's servant, Mishka, poor townspeople like the widow the mayor has just beaten, the merchants from whom the mayor extorts bribes, landowners like Bobchinskii and Dobchinskii, middle-ranking provincial bureaucrats (who may also be landowners) like the mayor, the superintendent of schools, the director of charitable institutions, the postmaster , and...