The Alogical and Absurdist Aspects of Russian Realist Drama

The Alogical and Absurdist Aspects of Russian Realist Drama Simon Karlinsky The first performance of Nikolai Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General took place in April of 1836 with the expressed approval and encouragement of the reigning monarch, Nicholas I. Although not very successfully staged, the play created an effect that neither the emperor nor the playwright had foreseen. T o Gogol’s horror, much of the popular opinion of the day and a considerable segment of the press saw in his play a wholesale indictment of Russian reality. Those who favored such an indictment hastened to stress the realistic nature of the new comedy and insisted on seeing in it a precisely recorded, unvarnished transcript of what life was really like in a provincial Russian town. Monarchist-minded critics, such as the notor­ ious Faddei Bulgarin and other defenders of the régime, on the other hand, stressed the unreal, improbable, even fantastic nature of the comedy’s characters and situations. The Russia depicted by Gogol, those status-quo defenders argued, existed only in the author’s imagin­ ation. Throughout the nineteenth century the anti-establishment interpre­ tation of The Inspector General as a soberly realistic satire prevailed. Twentieth-century critical views, however, suggest that, whatever their political motivations at the time, both sides had valid arguing points. With its drab, provincial setting, with its portrayal of the lives of lesser government officials shown in specific and precise detail, The Inspector General falls indeed within the new realistic trends of the 1830’s and 40’s. But Gogol’s contemporaries (except for those who attacked the play on political grounds) failed to discern other, equally important strains in the play: the grotesque and surrealistic forms of its humor, the deliberate stretching of logic, the strange sexual overtones and the strong admixture of the absurd in the motivations and actions of the central character, Khlestakov. Gogol’s use of alogism can be illustrated in its basic form by citing the remark made by the Judge in the very first scene of the play. De­ 147 148 Comparative Drama fending one of his subordinates against the charge of constantly smell­ ing of alcohol, the Judge explains that the man can’t help it: his nurse dropped him when he was a baby and since then he has emitted a slight odor of vodka. The explanation, accepted with equanimity by the Mayor and other characters, is quintessentially surrealistic, with its deliberate juxtaposition of two prosaic, believable facts (the dropped baby and the smell of vodka) to support a patently absurd explanation. Equally surrealistic is the Mayor’s note to his wife, scribbled on a restaurant bill, so that she is puzzled to read of her husband’s hope for Divine mercy in exchange for two dill pickles and a half-portion of caviar. The long sequence of bribery scenes dissolves into absurdity when, after accepting thousands of rubles from town officials and mer­ chants, the false inspector and his servant settle for smaller sums (always insisting that these are loans, not bribes), then for a silver tray, a loaf of sugar and, finally, for a worthless piece of string. Absence of the traditional love interest in The Inspector General was a deliberate stratagem on Gogol’s part and it puzzled his con­ temporary audiences. The conservative critic Osip Senkovsky dem­ onstrated his misunderstanding of this aspect of the comedy when he chided Gogol for not including among his characters some young woman, a friend or an enemy of the Mayor’s daughter, with whom Khlestakov could become romantically involved, “thus adding interest to the entire play.” The whole point of Khlestakov’s frantic and simultaneous courtship of the Mayor’s wife and daughter, which replaces the customary love intrigue, is a parodistic reductio ad absurdum of that particular literary convention. In the 19th century, Khlestakov’s mindless and unmotivated courtship of the two women was interpreted as further evidence of his flighty, irresponsible char­ acter. But if Gogol is satirizing anything here, it is the automatic expectations of the audience (and, as we see, one of the leading critics of the time fell into his trap). Khlestakov proposes marriage to the Mayor...