The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Nikolai Gogol · a comedy in five acts · first performed at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, 19 April 1836 (Old Style), and published the same year · scored in the final text of 1842 · scored on Gogol’s Russian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, each quotation with a plain English rendering beneath, and no published translation quoted
Mode
Comedy of exposure and mistaken identity, turning at its close to dread; satire of a whole administration in one town
Mythos
The awaited judgment: an inspector incognito who will see everything, a false judge received with terror and gifts, the true one announced and never seen; the impostor king of carnival as the empty vessel of every petitioner’s need
Phase
From the Mayor’s news to his officials, through the double terror at the inn, the lying, the bribes and the petitions, and a betrothal, to a letter read aloud, the gendarme’s announcement and a stage of frozen figures
Presentation
Drama; five acts, one town, about two days, a speaking cast of about twenty-five with some dozen principal parts; nearly all dialogue, with stage directions spare until the closing tableau; the epigraph of 1842 at its head
Register
From Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky’s quarrel over a syllable and Khlestakov’s breathless lying to the Mayor’s rage at himself and a silence held on a full stage
Scale
One district town and its offices: courts, charities, schools, post and police; its merchants, its poor, one family; the capital as a place imagined
Governing Proposition
The Mayor of a district town calls his officials together to tell them that an inspector is coming, incognito; two landowners bring word of a young man at the inn, and the town takes a hungry, penniless clerk for the inspector, feasts him, lends him money, betroths him to the Mayor’s daughter, and learns from a letter what he was, just as a gendarme announces the real one. The wager of the play is that a power founded on fear and bribery manufactures its own judge out of nothing, that the nothing obliges, and that a comedy which turns its last line on the audience and then freezes its stage can show the spectators that the town is themselves.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Mayor, Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky, has called the town’s officials to his house, and his first words to them are the play: “Я пригласил вас, господа, с тем, чтобы сообщить вам пренеприятное известие: к нам едет ревизор”
(I have invited you, gentlemen, to tell you a most unpleasant piece of news: an inspector is coming to us). He is to come incognito. The town is a district town far from any border, and until this sentence it has had nothing to fear but itself.
One by one the officials report, and each report is a confession of what must be hidden. The Judge, Lyapkin-Tyapkin, is a freethinker on the strength of five or six books. Zemlyanika keeps the charities and the hospital, where the German doctor, Gibner, speaks no Russian. Khlopov superintends the schools; Shpekin keeps the post. The police are Derzhimorda and his like. The names are jokes that bite, and each official is a department of the state set down in a body. Nobody asks whether the inspector will be just. They ask only what he will see.
Then the two landowners, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, arrive with news: a young man has been staying at the inn. They tell it together and fall out over who said “Э!”
(Eh!) first. The town has its inspector before anyone has met him. The Mayor, in his haste, puts a hatbox on his head for a hat. The most trivial syllable in the play has set the machine running, and from here to the end nothing in it runs on anything but rumour and fear.
Movement II
The second act opens at the inn on the servant, Osip, alone, talking of his master: a young clerk, Khlestakov, who has lost at cards in Penza, spent everything, and now sits unpaid and hungry in a town he cannot leave. Osip has a peasant’s shrewdness. The monologue is a set piece, and the plot could lose it; the play keeps it because the servant sees his master as no one in the town will.
Khlestakov is starving, and he has no means to pay. When the Mayor appears in the doorway, each man is sure the other has come to ruin him. Khlestakov’s terror speaks as bluster; the Mayor hears in it the menace of an inspector who is hiding his power; and each misreading feeds the other. It is the play’s double terror, built so exactly that neither man can say anything the other will not take for what he fears.
Khlestakov never plans a fraud. The town forces the role on him, and his own emptiness lets him take it. The officials need an inspector more than any inspector needs them, and they will make one out of whatever is at hand. What is at hand is a clerk with nothing in his head and nothing in his pocket, and by the next act he is the Mayor’s guest.
Movement III
Fed and flattered, Khlestakov begins to talk, and once he has begun he cannot stop. He describes his life in Petersburg: the soup that comes straight from Paris in its pot, the watermelon that cost seven hundred roubles, the “тридцать пять тысяч одних курьеров”
(thirty-five thousand couriers alone). He is “с Пушкиным на дружеской ноге”
(on a friendly footing with Pushkin).
The lie outruns the liar. Each claim lifts the next, and the hosts, who need every word of it, believe more the more absurd it becomes. He is nearly made a field marshal by his own sentences, and then falls asleep in the middle of one. He has, as he says of himself, “Лёгкость в мыслях необыкновенная”
(an extraordinary lightness in my thoughts). It is the comic height of the play: a flight made of nothing, which the audience feels as flight.
The act is the hinge. Up to it the town has feared the inspector; after it the town will pay him. Khlestakov has not chosen his part, and does not quite know he is playing it; he becomes what the town needs because there is nothing in him to resist the role. That is the play’s disclosure in a single figure: a power built on fear does not need a judge to exist, only a vessel into which the fear can be poured.
Movement IV
The fourth act is a procession. The officials come one after another, and each in turn lends the inspector money; Khlestakov, who began in terror, grows easier with every loan. The repetition is the point, the town paying for its own fear in instalments, and it is also the act’s limit: one action, done again and again, with some of the comedy left to the actors.
Then the petitioners. The merchants bring sugar loaves and complaints against the Mayor. The locksmith’s wife comes because her husband was taken for a soldier. The sergeant’s widow comes because she was flogged, the woman who, in the Mayor’s account, “сама себя высекла”
(flogged herself). In three words the play gives the lie of the whole state: the injury done by power is written up as the fault of the injured. Bobchinsky’s petition is only that the great men of Petersburg be told that he lives in the town.
In one scene Khlestakov proposes to the Mayor’s daughter, Marya Antonovna, and to her mother, Anna Andreevna, each in turn. It parodies the love plot the comedy refuses to have. The rivalry of mother and daughter is the family’s share in the machine, and Anna Andreevna’s provincial grandeur is ready for the capital before the capital has been offered. These are the play’s thinnest scenes, and they carry it to a betrothal.
Movement V
The betrothal raises the Mayor to his height. He and his family imagine Petersburg, a place of generals and balls. Then a letter comes to light that unmasks the inspector, and it is read aloud in turns by those it insults, each passing it on when he reaches his own portrait. The device belongs to the stage alone: the audience hears every man laugh at the others until his own turn comes.
The Mayor’s rage is at himself, and then it is at the house. He turns out across the footlights: “Чему смеётесь? Над собою смеётесь!”
(What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!) The epigraph Gogol set over the play in 1842 had said as much, “На зеркало неча пенять, коли рожа крива”
(no use blaming the mirror if your mug is crooked). The town is not a remote province. It is the people watching it.
A gendarme enters and announces that an official has arrived from Petersburg by personal order. By Gogol’s direction every figure freezes, and the stage holds in silence: the dumb scene. The true inspector is announced and never seen; the audience is left to imagine him. The play was first performed on 19 April 1836, in the presence of Nicholas I; part of its audience received it with fury, and in June its author went abroad. Gogol revised it over six years, and the text of 1842, with its epigraph and its frozen close, is the one played and read since.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing to take. The first line is the whole engine, “Я пригласил вас, господа, с тем, чтобы сообщить вам пренеприятное известие: к нам едет ревизор”
(I have invited you, gentlemen, to tell you a most unpleasant piece of news: an inspector is coming to us), and every scene after it turns the same screw. The officials’ reports in the first act set out what each has to hide; the second act must show Khlestakov starving and unpaid so that his terror can meet the Mayor’s; the lying of the third is the hinge; the bribes of the fourth are the town paying for its own fear; the betrothal of the fifth raises the Mayor to the height from which the letter drops him. Held below the top by the fourth act, which runs by repeating one action, and by Osip’s monologue (II.1), a set piece the plot could lose.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a system of power founded on fear and bribery manufactures its own judge out of nothing, and the nothing obliges, because the officials need an inspector more than any inspector needs them. Khlestakov never plans a fraud; the town forces the role on him, and his own emptiness, “Лёгкость в мыслях необыкновенная”
(an extraordinary lightness in my thoughts, III), lets him take it. The second disclosure is the Mayor’s turn on the house: the town is not a remote province but the audience. The sergeant’s widow who, in the Mayor’s account, “сама себя высекла”
(flogged herself) is the lie of the state in three words. Held below the top because the condition is shown from outside and as a mechanism; no consciousness in the play is entered deeply enough to disclose what living inside it costs.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Comedy rises here, in two directions. The comic height is Khlestakov’s lying in the third act: the soup come straight from Paris in its pot, the watermelon of seven hundred roubles, “тридцать пять тысяч одних курьеров”
(thirty-five thousand couriers alone), his being “с Пушкиным на дружеской ноге”
(on a friendly footing with Pushkin), until the lie, outrunning the liar, nearly makes him a field marshal and he falls asleep in the middle of it. It is a flight made of nothing, and the audience feels it as flight. The dreadful height is the close: the Mayor’s rage at himself, the gendarme’s announcement, and the dumb scene, every figure frozen by Gogol’s direction. Between the two the register is the steady comic level of exposure; elevation is rare by design, and the axis scores frequency as well as height.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth is built, and built into the structure. The play is an awaited judgment: an inspector incognito who will see everything, a false judge received with terror and gifts, and at the close the true one announced from Petersburg and never seen, while the town turns to stone. That shape is the Last Judgment as a district town would stage it, and the play does not need its author’s later gloss to carry it: the frozen tableau is load-bearing, not decoration. Khlestakov is the impostor king of the old carnival, the empty vessel into which each petitioner pours his need; he became a type and a word, khlestakovshchina, while staying a hungry clerk who has lost at cards in Penza. The Mayor is the tyrant who is himself a subject. Held below the top because the archetype stays implicit within the realist comedy, and the judgment is built most fully in the last minutes.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the comedy of exposure, from Molière to Fonvizin’s The Minor (1782), with the mistaken identity of every stage since Plautus, and Griboedov’s Woe from Wit as the nearest Russian precedent. The swerve: a comedy without a positive hero, without a reasoner to state the moral, without a true love plot (Khlestakov’s proposals to the daughter and the mother in one scene parody it), and without a resolution, ending in a silent tableau that shuts the laughter off. The stake was real: a satire on the whole provincial administration under Nicholas I, first played in his presence, received with fury by part of its audience, and followed by its author’s departure abroad in June 1836. Held below the top because the turn radicalises satiric comedy more than it makes a new form, and Woe from Wit had already cut much of the road.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play’s claim, that the town is the spectators, is made by the theatre itself: the Mayor’s line is turned out across the footlights, the epigraph names the play a mirror, and the dumb scene makes the audience look at a stage of frozen faces until it sees its own. Told as a story, the anecdote would be a joke about a mistaken clerk; as a play, where each official must speak his fear aloud and the audience knows what none of them knows, it becomes a demonstration that fear invents its object, carried by dramatic irony from the first act to the reading of the letter. The letter itself, read aloud in turns by those it insults, each passing it on at his own portrait, is a device only the stage could make. Held below the top because the five-act comic frame is inherited and works conventionally for long stretches.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence is nearly two centuries of readings that do not close. Belinsky and the radical critics read social satire. Gogol himself, in The Denouement of The Government Inspector (1846), read it as an allegory of the soul before judgment. Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol (1944) read it as a play of the void, with Khlestakov a creature of its fourth dimension. Meyerhold remade it on the stage in 1926 as a vision of a whole empire, the most argued production in Soviet theatre history. The questions stay open: whether Khlestakov is a swindler or a mirror, whether the real inspector is a relief or a doom, whether the end is comedy or terror. The fictitious figures who crowd the dialogue and the chains of hearsay still yield. Held off the top because the depth is mostly of one kind, the reverberation of a single mechanism, and the surface is grasped at first encounter.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is Russian drama and comedy of the nineteenth century, and the Russian literature that came after. The force: it made the comedy of the whole social body, with the state itself as protagonist, and fixed a tone, laughter turning to dread, that Russian writing kept. Held below the top by a narrower reach beyond Russia, where the play is much performed and adapted without having reorganised European comedy, and by Woe from Wit standing beside it as the founding comedy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ostrovsky’s comedies of merchants and officials; Sukhovo-Kobylin’s trilogy; Saltykov-Shchedrin’s town of Glupov; Dostoevsky’s comic grotesques; Bulgakov, who staged and adapted Gogol; Erdman’s The Mandate (1925) and The Suicide, unthinkable without it; Meyerhold’s production of 1926; and in the language, Khlestakov’s name and the Mayor’s lines as proverbs.
Score: 8.6 / 10
About a hundred and ninety years. The text survives whole in Gogol’s final version of 1842. Presence is continuous: in the Russian repertory without a break since 1836, taught in Russian schools for generations, translated into most of the world’s literary languages and often played abroad, and adapted for the screen and the opera house. It has outlived its conditions: the Nicholaevan district town, its posts and its ranks, are history, and the play is performed for the mechanism they pressed into view. Charged: its surface is bureaucratic satire fixed in a particular administration, the kind of topical surface the axis weighs against a work, and its presence outside the Russian sphere, though steady, is a fraction of its presence within it. That holds it at the floor of its band, below the figure of the widest presence.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the Russian as far as it can be heard here; the comic music of Gogol’s sentence is known in its famous lines, not in every speech, and what cannot be heard is neither credited nor charged. The construction is near faultless: exposition in one sentence; the double misunderstanding of the second act, where the Mayor and Khlestakov each take the other’s terror for menace; the lying; the bribes; the betrothal; the letter; the gendarme. Each voice is distinct: the Mayor’s coarse cunning and his sudden piety, Anna Andreevna’s provincial grandeur, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky quarrelling over who said “Э!”
(Eh!) first, the Judge’s freethinking on the strength of five or six books, Osip’s peasant shrewdness, Khlestakov’s breathless wandering. The names are jokes that bite: Lyapkin-Tyapkin, Derzhimorda, Zemlyanika. Held off the top because the comic machinery of the fourth act is mechanical by intent and runs long, and its scenes with the women are thinner than its scenes with the men.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky’s “Э!”
(Eh!), the most trivial thing in the play, and the dumb scene, the most terrible. One law governs both: rumour and fear, multiplied by guilt, make a reality the town then has to live in. The gossip that names Khlestakov is the same mechanism as the letter that unmasks him, and the same as the real inspector, announced but unseen, whom the audience must now imagine for themselves. Farce, the Mayor putting a hatbox on his head for a hat in the first act, and the dread of the close obey the same physics; the hunger of the clerk and the greed of the officials are one appetite at two scales. The range is narrow, one town and two days, but within it nothing breaks the law. Charged a step for that narrowness, and for Bobchinsky’s request in the fourth act, the law at its most nearly whimsical.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Much of a state is held in one structure. The administration in its departments: the courts, the charities and the hospital, the schools, the post, the police. Commerce, in the merchants who bring sugar loaves and complaints. The poor, in the locksmith’s wife whose husband was taken for a soldier and the sergeant’s widow who was flogged. The family, in the Mayor’s wife and daughter and their rivalry. The capital, imagined and longed for as a place of generals and balls. The orders present are integrated, each a branch of one machine that the false inspector works in turn. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the play leaves out: religion is present only as hypocrisy and the Judge’s borrowed atheism; consciousness is shown from outside, as fear and vanity; history and the natural order hardly enter. It is the provincial state in cross section, not a world.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 9.0, then The Inner Law at 8.9. A text whole in its final version and in the Russian repertory without a break since 1836, translated and played far beyond it; a construction near faultless from the one-sentence exposition to the gendarme, with every voice distinct; and one law of rumour and fear, multiplied by guilt, that governs the most trivial syllable in the play and its most terrible silence.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7: the administration, commerce, the poor, the family and the imagined capital are held as one machine, and the sacred, an inner life, history and the natural order hardly enter; it is the provincial state in cross section, not a world. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.0, where the two heights, the lying of the third act and the frozen close, are of the first rank and rare by design. The music of Gogol’s Russian beyond its famous lines is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last three by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Nikolai Gogol’s Ревизор (Revizor), a comedy in five acts, written in 1835, first performed at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, on 19 April 1836 (Old Style), in the presence of Nicholas I, and first published the same year. Gogol revised it over six years. It is scored as the play in its final text, the text of the collected Works of 1842, which carries the epigraph added then and the dumb scene with Gogol’s direction for it, as a text for performance. Gogol’s companion pieces, Leaving the Theatre after the Performance of a New Comedy (1842) and The Denouement of The Government Inspector (1846), with his notes for the actors, are context for reading and not the work; productions are evidence of its life, and none of them is the work. Every score is judged on the play in Gogol’s Russian, which is not in hand. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Russian is quoted on this page only where its words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Constance Garnett’s version is the English best known to this reading and was used for sense, with later versions made for the stage beside it. None is in hand, none is quoted, and nothing in any of them is charged or credited to the play. The Russian is known here in its famous lines, not as a whole text heard aloud, so the music of Gogol’s sentence beyond them is neither credited nor charged; construction and voice, which survive into any close version, are judged. Names follow the usual English forms. References are by act, and by act and scene where the scene is certain. Facts that could not be verified, among them the playing time, the Mayor’s words on the town’s distance from any frontier and on the faces he sees at the close, the length of the silence the final direction asks for, the censor’s part in the first production, Gogol’s words on laughter as the play’s one honest character, the date of Garnett’s version, and particular later readings, films and operas, are not given.