At that very moment enter Petr Iványch Dóbchinsky and Petr Iványch Bóbchinsky. Everyone knows them, you know them very well: they play the part of the town Gazette. They go about the town all day long, and as soon as they have learnt something interesting they both hurry to spread the news, interrupting each other in telling it, and hurrying immediately to some other place to be the first to communicate the news to someone else. They have been at the only inn of the town, and there they saw a very suspicious person: a young man, “who has something, you know, extraordinary about his face.” He is living there for a fortnight, never paying a penny, and does not journey any further. “What is his object in staying so long in town like ours?” And then, when they were taking their lunch he passed them by and looked so inquisitively in their plates—who may he be? Evidently, the Governor and all present conclude, he must be the Inspector-General who stays there incognito.... A general confusion results from the suspicion. The Governor starts immediately for the inn, to make the necessary enquiries. The womenfolk are in a tremendous excitement.
The stranger is simply a young man who is travelling to rejoin his father. On some post-station he met with a certain captain—a great master at cards—and lost all he had in his pocket. Now he cannot proceed any farther, and he cannot pay the landlord, who refuses to credit him with any more meals. The young man feels awfully hungry—no wonder he looked so inquisitively into the plates of the two gentlemen—and resorts to all sorts of tricks to induce the landlord to send him something for his dinner. Just as he is finishing some fossil-like cutlet enters the Gorodníchiy; and a most comic scene follows, the young man thinking that the Governor came to arrest him, and the Governor thinking that he is speaking to the Inspector-General who is trying to conceal his identity. The Governor offers to remove the young man to some more comfortable place. “No, thank you, I have no intent to go to a jail,” sharply retorts the young man.... But it is to his own house that the Governor takes the supposed Inspector, and now an easy life begins for the adventurer. All the functionaries appear in turn to introduce themselves, and everyone is only too happy to give him a bribe of a hundred roubles or so. The merchants come to ask his protection from the Governor; the widow who was flogged comes to lodge a complaint.... In the meantime the young man enters into a flirtation with both the wife and the daughter of the Governor; and, finally, being caught at a very pathetic moment when he is kneeling at the feet of the daughter, without further thought he makes a proposition of marriage. But, having gone so far, the young man, well-provided now with money, hastens to leave the town on the pretext of going to see an uncle; he will be back in a couple of days....
The delight of the Governor can easily be imagined. His Excellency, the Inspector-General, going to marry the Governor’s daughter! He and his wife are already making all sorts of plans. They will remove to St. Petersburg, the Gorodníchiy will soon be a general, and you will see how he will keep the other Gorodníchies at his door!... The happy news spreads about the town, and all the functionaries and the society of the town hasten to offer their congratulations to the old man. There is a great gathering at his house—when the postmaster comes in. He has followed the advice of the Governor, and has opened a letter which the supposed Inspector-General had addressed to somebody at St. Petersburg. He now brings this letter. The young man is no inspector at all, and here is what he writes to a Bohemian friend of his about his adventures in the provincial town:[12]
In short, the letter produces a great sensation. The friends of the Governor are delighted to see him and his family in such straits, all accuse each other, and finally fall upon the two gentlemen, when a police soldier enters the room and announces in a loud voice: “A functionary from St. Petersburg, with Imperial orders, wants to see you all immediately. He stays at the hotel.” Thereupon the curtain drops over a living picture of which Gógol himself had made a most striking sketch in pencil, and which is usually reproduced in his works; it shows how admirably well, with what a fine artistic sense, he represented to himself his characters.
The Inspector-General marks a new era in the development of dramatic art in Russia. All the comedies and dramas which were being played in Russia at that time (with the exception, of course, of Misfortune from Intelligence, which, however, was not allowed to appear on the stage) hardly deserved the name of dramatic literature: so imperfect and puerile they were. The Inspector-General, on the contrary, would have marked at the time of its appearance (1835) an epoch in any language. Its stage qualities, which will be appreciated by every good actor; its sound and hearty humour; the natural character of the comical scenes, which result from the very characters of those who appear in this comedy; the sense of measure which pervades it—all these make it one of the best comedies in existence. If the conditions of life which are depicted here were not so exclusively Russian, and did not so exclusively belong to a bygone stage of life which is unknown outside Russia, it would have been generally recognised as a real pearl of the world’s literature. This is why, when it was played a few years ago in Germany, by actors who properly understood Russian life, it achieved such a tremendous success.
The Inspector-General provoked such a storm of hostile criticism on the part of all reactionary Russia, that it was hopeless to expect that the comedy which Gógol began next, concerning the life of the St. Petersburg functionaries (The Vladimir Cross), could ever be admitted on the stage, and Gógol never finished it, only publishing a few striking scenes from it: The Morning of a Busy Man, The Law Suit, etc. Another comedy, Marriage, in which he represented the hesitation and terror through which an inveterate bachelor goes before a marriage, which he finally eludes by jumping out of a window a few moments before the beginning of the ceremony, has not lost its interest even now. It is so full of comical situations, which fine actors cannot but highly appreciate, that it is still a part of the current répertoire of the Russian stage.
DEAD SOULS
Gógol’s main work was Dead Souls. This is a novel almost without a plot, or rather with a plot of the utmost simplicity. Like the plot of The Inspector-General, it was suggested to Gógol by Púshkin. In those times, when serfdom was flourishing in Russia, the ambition of every nobleman was to become the owner of at least a couple of hundred serfs. The serfs used to be sold like slaves and could be bought separately. A needy nobleman, Tchítchikoff, conceives accordingly a very clever plan. A census of the population being made only every ten or twenty years, and every serf-owner having in the interval to pay taxes for every male soul which he owned at the time of the last census, even though part of his “souls” be dead since, Tchítchikoff conceives the idea of taking advantage of this anomaly. He will buy the dead souls at a very small expense: the landlords will be only too pleased to get rid of this burden and surely will sell them for anything; and after Tchítchikoff has bought two or three hundred of these imaginary serfs, he will buy cheap land somewhere in the southern prairies, transfer the dead souls, on paper, to that land, register them as if they were really settled there, and mortgage that new sort of estate to the State Landlords’ Bank. In this way he can easily make the beginnings of a fortune. With this plan Tchítchikoff comes to a provincial town and begins his operations. He makes, first of all, the necessary visits.
“The newcomer made visits to all the functionaries of the town. He went to testify his respects to the Governor, who like Tchítchikoff himself, was neither stout nor thin. He was decorated with a cross and was spoken of as a person who would soon get a star; but was, after all, a very good fellow and was fond of making embroideries upon fine muslin. Tchítchikoff’s next visits were to the Vice-Governor, to the Chief Magistrate, to the Chief of Police, the Head of the Crown Factories ... but it is so difficult to remember all the powerful persons in this world ... sufficient to say that the newcomer showed a wonderful activity as regards visits. He even went to testify his respects to the Sanitary Inspector, and to the Town Surveyor, and after that he sat for a long time in his carriage trying to remember to whom else he might pay a visit; but he could think of no more functionaries in the town. In his conversations with all these influential persons he managed to say something to flatter every one of them. In talking with the Governor he accidentally dropped the remark that when one enters this province one thinks of paradise—all the roads being quite like velvet; and that ‘governments which nominate wise functionaries surely deserve universal gratitude.’ To the Chief of the Police he said something very gratifying about the police force, and while he was talking to the Vice-Governor and to the presiding magistrate, who were only State-Councillors, he twice made the mistake of calling them ‘Your Excellency,’ with which mistake they were both immensely pleased. The result of all this was that the Governor asked Tchítchikoff to come that same day to an evening party, and the other functionaries invited him, some to dine with them, others to a cup of tea, and others again to a party of whist.
“About himself Tchítchikoff avoided talking, and if he spoke at all it was in vague sentences only, with a remarkable modesty, his conversation taking in such cases a rather bookish turn. He said that he was a mere nobody in this world and did not wish people to take any particular interest in him; that he had had varied experiences in his life, suffered in the service of the State for the sake of truth, had had many enemies, some of whom had even attempted his life, but that now, wishing to lead a quiet existence, he intended to find at last some corner to live in, and, having come to this town, he considered it his imperative duty to testify his respect to the chief functionaries of the place. This was all they could learn in town about the new person who soon made his appearance at the Governor’s evening party.