Word: gogol
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Sullivan, who wrote the script in collaboration with the actors, borrowed the theme from Gogol's masterpiece The Inspector General, about a corrupt town that goes all out trying to bribe a feckless clerk whom it collectively mistakes for a government investigator. The setting and some of the plot, however, came from an episode Sullivan heard about when serving on a National Endowment for the Arts theater panel: a beleaguered troupe, desperate to sustain its grant, offered to bribe an agency inspector who was also a playwright by pledging to produce his plays...
...Russian author Gogol wrote a story called "The Nose." A civil servant wakes up one morning and discovers his nose is missing. Months later, he spies it walking down the street, wearing the uniform of a civil servant three ranks higher...
...tell the truth, they seem to revel in the uncertainty. In the 19th century, Nikolai Gogol depicted Russia in his novel Dead Souls as a wildly careering troika rushing into the unknown. Now, after seven decades of forced efforts to mold the Russian mind to fit rigid communist orthodoxy, people have taken to the road again with such an exhilarating clatter of hooves that it sometimes seems as if the destination means nothing, movement is everything...
There is an unpredictable, impish streak in the Russian character often expressed in the desire to confound expectations and astonish with feats of prowess. The Russians have always longed to drive their national troika at breakneck speed, forcing other nations, in Gogol's words, to "look askance, as they step aside to give her the right of way." Now history has accorded them a unique chance...
Where will the centrifugal disintegration end? Will the Crimea separate itself the way The Nose did in Gogol's story? Will the nuclear button be divided too? Instead of just one -- four, or a whole keyboard? And then what about nuclear civil...