Word: inspectors
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Provided gullibility to the flash of the city is another traditional literary motif, and Gegal exploits it to the hill. The townspeople strain to believe that the vain, petulant, but eminently purchaseable (and therefore not so terrifying after all) dandy is a real inspector general. At the same time Khlestakov screams with fear that these locals are going to incarcerate him in their jail. But Khlestakov and his manservant Osip, are the ones who group the situation and take advantage of the confusion. Eventually, all of the feuding factions are victimized by the liar from the city...
John Rudman is eminently credible in his title role as an inspector general-Petersburg dandy. He has a less and hungry look appropriate to an official in the Russian bureaucracy, but his hunger is for entertainment (or, at one point, food), rather than power, and his foppish manner belies initial impressions. Nourished by the town's mistaken flattery, Khlestakov's age expends as his imperious manner is fed as he deludes himself by the lies he concocts to increase his importance in the eyes of the locals...
...Inspector General is extraordinarily dependent on a mob of minor characters to sharpen it. Throughout the play, dozens of lesser figures, each with a foible, prods the play forward or merely establishes a stereotype. The title figure does not even appear until the second act, the first is spent as the town's officials establish that they are all bastards and vulnerable to even the most superficial housecleaning. The first act doesn't work too well, but it does establish the necessary preliminaries. The act is redeemed from tedium by the performances of two local landowners, Peter Ivanovich Dobchinski...
...obvious level The Inspector General is a satire on the czarist government and Russia's corrupt bureaucracy. It appealed to Casr Nicholas for some reason, and he ordered it performed, so Gogol never has any difficulty with the censors. The literary critics of the intelligentsia praised it for its social content, though Gogol minimized that facet of The Inspector General. He attempted to explain the play himself, always a dangerous course for a writer to take in relation to his own production. Vladimir Nabokov commented that this interpretation might well be considered "the kind of deceit that is practiced...
...CRITICAL caricaturing of the Inspector General easily extends from politics to provincial Russian society in general. Merchants are ready to bribe the Petersburg dandy, and they wear the beards and traditional dress that Peter the Great had hoped to stamp out some centuries before. The willingness of a mother and a daughter to compete with each other for his charms and the stereotyping of Russian characters--ranging from drunken clerks to free thinking judges--reinforces...