"NikolaiGogol-TheInspectorGeneral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gogol Nikolai V)

The
Inspector-General

A comedy in five acts translated by
Thomas Seltzer from the Russian of

Nicolay
Gogol





INTRODUCTION




The Inspector-General is a national institution. To
place a purely literary valuation upon it and call it the
greatest of Russian comedies would not convey the significance
of its position either in Russian literature or in
Russian life itself. There is no other single work in the
modern literature of any language that carries with it
the wealth of associations which the Inspector-General
does to the educated Russian. The Germans have their
Faust; but Faust is a tragedy with a cosmic philosophic
theme. In England it takes nearly all that is implied in
the comprehensive name of Shakespeare to give the same
sense of bigness that a Russian gets from the mention
of the Revizor.

That is not to say that the Russian is so defective in
the critical faculty as to balance the combined creative
output of the greatest English dramatist against Gogol's
one comedy, or even to attribute to it the literary value
of any of Shakespeare's better plays. What the Russian's
appreciation indicates is the pregnant role that
literature plays in the life of intellectual Russia. Here
literature is not a luxury, not a diversion. It is bone
of the bone, flesh of the flesh, not only of the intelligentsia,
but also of a growing number of the common
people, intimately woven into their everyday existence,
part and parcel of their thoughts, their aspirations, their
social, political and economic life. It expresses their
collective wrongs and sorrows, their collective hopes and
strivings. Not only does it serve to lead the movements
of the masses, but it is an integral component element of
those movements. In a word, Russian literature is completely
bound up with the life of Russian society, and its