Word: petersburgs
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...chief of the St. Petersburg Times editorial page took a hard look at his own handiwork and found it wanting. Certain that few of the Times's 191,000 readers in ultraconservative St. Petersburg were reading-much less heeding-the paper's consistently liberal editorials, Robert Pittman expressed his dissatisfaction in a memo to fellow staffers last fall: "When an editorial writer doesn't know the answer to a problem, he frequently describes it as a dilemma. There are also many dilemmas in the concept of the present editorial page." As an alternative, Pittman proposed...
...surrounding presences--the grasping mediocre manservant. Ganya Ivoglin, his drunkard father and consumptive brother, the soft headed but sweethearted Madame Yepanchin with her sheltered virgin of a daughter; and Lebedev, a disgustingly, dissipated opportunist and hanger-on who has left his family behind him and come to St. Petersburg to find a master who will leash him. Let these come into the action and the audience senses a full, real context (though their actions and dialogue are as stylized as those of the other three...
...hungry young Petersburg dandy. Ivan Alexandrovitch Khlestakov, is holed up in a small-town hotel room, living on credit, and starving, unable to pay his bills, having lost all his money at cards. Meanwhile, the town's mayor receives words that an inspector general, travelling incognito, is to pay a surprise visit to the town, where he will inevitably discover all of the pecadillos and greater sins the administrators have made habitual. The officials mistake the impoverish Khlestakov for the Inspector General, and he is wined, dined, and "lost" money (the officials leading it think that they are bribing...
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...
...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...