Situation in the city
The events of the work take place in 1831 in a very ordinary city, the name of which is unknown. There is absolutely no order in it:
- Patients smoke tobacco, and doctors, dressed in dirty clothes, do not even think about them, hoping that they will either recover on their own or die.
- Geese are walking in the courthouse, and the guards are drying clothes.
- The assessor is a drunkard who does not smell very pleasant.
- The judge writes in a memorandum in such a way that no one will ever be able to discern where the truth is and where the lies are.
- In schools, teachers make faces while teaching a lesson, thereby setting a bad example for students. Because of this, children do not want to study.
The streets are dirty and it’s impossible to walk calmly without bumping into some garbage. Life for the common people in this city is not fabulous.
Especially the merchants, whom the mayor Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky robs in every possible way. He takes everything he sees. But not only merchants feel bad, but other people.
The mayor ordered a married man to be sent as a soldier, which is illegal, thereby depriving the wife of her husband. They should have taken the tailor's son instead, but the parents gave the mayor money for their own child. This is what life is like in a provincial town. All this injustice is led by bribe takers and scammers. The same mayor. There are several of its negative qualities:
- silly;
- insignificant;
- arrogant;
- conceited.
Judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin is also a bribe-taker, only he takes bribes with greyhound puppies. He is freethinking, cunning and godless.
Arrival of the auditor
The mayor is terribly afraid of being checked, because he lives by one single rule, which can be formulated as follows: any official has the right to steal , it’s just that minor ranks must steal small things, and high ranks can steal big.
For example, neighborhood police steal silver spoons from a tavern. The man knows about this, but does not believe that it should be punished. He scolds one of the policemen not for theft, but for the fact that he took more than he was entitled to “according to his rank.”
He understands perfectly well that people do not like him and is afraid of punishment. Trying to find out who the informer is, he orders the postmaster Shpekin to open all the envelopes. But it turns out that the boss has been reading other people’s correspondence for a long time. Everything reaches the point of complete absurdity when the postmaster suggests that Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky also do this from time to time, because reading someone else’s things turns out to be very interesting.
We can say that Shpekin has no conscience and no sense of shame when he admits that he left one very interesting letter with him.
And none of them sees anything wrong with this. For them, the most important thing in a position is the appropriation of someone else’s property.
Taking money from those below them, they consider it normal to give bribes to those above them. This is their logic. All the people who came to Ivan Khlestakov had cash with them. The main idea of “The Inspector General” is veneration for rank, which can be seen in the address to Khlestakov. In his presence, everyone began to bow, humiliate themselves, and stutter.
The officials tolerated all the liar's antics, but did not stop calling the common people names. You can see how the family theme of the mayor is revealed in the comedy “The Inspector General”. His wife, Anna Andreevna, dreams of the wedding of her daughter Maria Antonovna and Khlestakov, while despising those around her and this “village”.
The judge and the superintendent of schools are nice to the auditor, but behind his back they call him names and hate him. Artemy Filippovich Zemlyanikov, a trustee of charitable institutions, reveals all the secrets at a meeting with Khlestakov, trying to curry favor.
Problems of the comedy "The Inspector General"
In any serious work there are problems, that is, the author identifies problems to which he wants to draw the reader’s attention and encourage them to think about their solution. The problem is clearly visible in classic works of Russian literature, such as the comedy “The Inspector General,” which we are now analyzing.
There are three main aspects worth emphasizing here:
- Reverence - officials, small and large, want recognition and veneration. And people are ready to give them this tribute in exchange for personal gain.
- Bribes to officials - both giving bribes and taking them - is immoral.
- Moral decline of society - morality is a measure of a person’s moral state. What does a decline in morality in society entail?
Gogol reflects these problems especially clearly in his work. Include the issue in an essay on the comedy “The Inspector General.”
Characteristics of the main character
Ivan Aleksandrovich Khlestakov spends his father’s money, which they send him, and loses it at cards. He considers himself the most important person, since he is, as he himself says, a nobleman and an official. But even Osip, his servant, is smarter than Ivan himself.
Money comes easily to him, because his father, the master, takes this money from the poor peasants. The only thing the young man wants is to live without straining. The fact that they suddenly began to show attention to his person did not shake Khlestakov. This would have alarmed any other person, but not him. He was used to everyone having to obey and please him.
He accepts money from others with a smile and wants to play cards as quickly as possible. He is a slacker, immature, stupid and vain person.
And no one suspected him of deception. After all, everyone wanted to see just such an auditor: someone who would turn a blind eye to many things because of money.
The ideological meaning of the comedy “The Inspector General”
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Gogol did not find a positive hero in any of the social groups of comedy. And the bureaucracy, and the merchants, and the city landowners - all appear completely naked, like some kind of abscess, like an ulcer eating away at Russia. This impression came about because the author of the comedy managed to capture and present in images not random, but significant aspects of his contemporary reality.
Behind each image of the comedy one can see the true face of one or another social group of Nicholas Russia, which suffered from rampant bureaucratic arbitrariness and the predation of merchants. It is not for nothing that Herzen regarded The Inspector General as a vivid protest “against the drunken and oppressive administration, against the thieves’ police, against general bad government.” “Nettle seed” (as officials and clerks have long been called) was indeed a scourge for the population: both peasants and small townsmen suffered from it, even merchants suffered... And although serfdom corroded Russia much more deeply, the victims of which were tens of millions of the working peasantry, however, Gogol did not see evil in the serf system; he, as can be seen in “Old World Landowners,” embellished serfdom, creating pictures of the peaceful life of serfs under the paternal protection of good landowners.
Despite the fact that the theme of “The Inspector General” covers the relatively narrow world of Russian reality of the 30s of the 19th century - the world of officials (landowners and merchants are given occasionally), the comedy is an exceptional work in its artistic and social value.
Gogol's contemporaries keenly sensed in the comedy a serious criticism of the bureaucratic-bureaucratic system of government. Passionate debate erupted around the comedy. The ruling circles (especially the bureaucracy), seeing their faces in Gogol's mirror, were indignant at the author. Covering up their class malice with the interests of the fatherland, which was allegedly desecrated and slandered by the artist, they tried to reject both the artistic and social value of comedy.
The corrupt critic Bulgarin shouted that “in Russia there are no such morals as Gogol gave in the comedy, that the author’s town is not Russian... in the comedy not a single clever word is heard, not a single noble trait of the human heart is seen...” Another critic from the same rows, Senkovsky, argued that “The Inspector General” is not a comedy, “but an empty joke.”
Gogol could not have paid attention to this howl of embittered bureaucrats, to the sweeping denial of any value of comedy, which attracted crowded auditoriums in the theaters of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The success was exceptional, rare. However, something different happened.
When it was not reactionary bureaucrats who started talking about comedy, but representatives of the revolutionary camp, who emphasized its enormous revealing power in relation to the autocratic bureaucratic system, Gogol lost heart. He, the most faithful and devoted defender of the monarchy, was almost counted among the revolutionaries. This was truly a blow for the artist; it was the one he least expected. Was it not he, Gogol reasoned, who showed in the last scene that not a single lie, not a single abuse can be hidden from the watchful eye of the king, and that the well-deserved punishment will sooner or later fall on the head of all who criminally use the trust of the supreme power?
Thus, we see that the author’s plan sharply diverged from the understanding of his comedy by his contemporaries. Gogol wanted to emphasize the moral depravity of people and use it to explain the problems in government. Readers and viewers saw in the comedy a sharp criticism not of individual officials, but of the entire socio-political system as a whole.
Comedy in Gogol's time really sounded as a signal to reassess the foundations of the socio-political system and awakened a critical attitude towards the management system. Contrary to the author's intentions, it revolutionized public consciousness. How did this happen?
It should be understood this way. Gogol thought that in The Inspector General he was giving criticism of individual, random phenomena of life; meanwhile, being a realist artist, he gave far from random phenomena of Nikolaev reality, but the most significant ones for it. In the comedy, the audience saw the blatant outrages of bureaucratic management.
This is precisely how Gogol’s advanced contemporaries understood “The Inspector General”. They correctly saw the reason for the decline of bureaucratic morals in the then management system. Understanding Gogol’s play in this way, they made it their banner in the fight against the most disgusting phenomena of Nicholas Russia.
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Main thought
The idea of creating a comedy came to the author during a conversation with Pushkin. He told how one man was mistaken for a highly respected man. Thus, the meaning of the comedy “The Inspector General” is that everyone is responsible for their actions . After all, justice will still prevail.
This city personifies any other provincial city in Russia. The writer is dissatisfied with the authorities for non-compliance with the laws, for their endless bribes. They are unworthy of their title. Now readers understand what the theme of the comedy “The Inspector General” is.
Composition and idea of the comedy “The Inspector General” by Gogol
The climax of the comedy “The Inspector General” is complex and still remains the subject of debate among researchers. The fact is that it is not so easy to determine the traditional places of exposition, plot, climax and denouement. Meanwhile, understanding the structure of a work is directly related to insight into the author’s intention and its idea.
Each action of the comedy has a unique compositional structure. In the first act, three compositional elements are distinguished: the beginning in the mayor's message about the auditor, the combination of exposition and the development of the conflict in the conversation between the mayor and the officials, and the introduction of the situation of the imaginary auditor - the arrival of Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky. It is worth noting a subtle psychological detail in this scene: only those not engaged in bureaucratic service could have imagined that the twenty-three-year-old fidgety little man was an important official in the capital. In the second act, the significance of the key scene - the meeting of the mayor and Khlestakov - is that the absurd mistake of the city landowners received the status of reality, being confirmed by the mayor, that is, the authorities. The central plot episode of the third act is Khlestakov’s reception at the mayor’s house, his unbridled boasting and lies, causing horror in the heads of officials. This is aptly summed up by the mayor: “Well, what if at least one half of what he said was true?” The key compositional feature of the fourth act is repeating scenes, that is, the main principle of the action is the repetition of the same situation, but in each subsequent one other characters participate; thanks to this technique, a gallery of urban types is presented in the fourth act.
The close interdependence of the composition and idea of “The Inspector General” is most clearly revealed in the following. The plot of the comedy is connected by three messages about the auditor, and each of them receives a corresponding response, the first two from officials, the third from all townspeople. When the mayor announces the auditor in the first phrase of the play, the officials exclaim:
Ammos Fedorovich . How's the auditor?
Artemy Filippovich . How's the auditor?
In the fifth act, in the midst of the triumph of some heroes and the envy of others, the postmaster appears with a printed letter from Khlestakov:
Postmaster. Amazing thing, gentlemen! The man we took for an auditor was not an auditor.
This time the news stunned everyone present:
All. Why not an auditor?
Messages and two symmetrical exclamations (“Like an auditor?” and “How not an auditor?”) form a kind of “plot frame.” Gogol's idea in this part of the plot is that a person, no matter how criminal he may be, is always given the opportunity to improve. The first message about the arrival of the auditor means a warning to the person so that he comes to his senses and realizes his guilt. From further events it is clear that the officials do not intend to change their behavior; on the contrary, they are going to deceive the auditor, and when they mistakenly take Khlestakov for him, they give him bribes, thus trying to bribe him. The news of a catastrophic mistake with Khlestakov means the exposure of officials, after which they must repent. However, the officials shy away from repentance: first, in the scene of reading the letter, they want to hear bad words from him about someone else, but not about themselves, thereby showing their readiness to always shift the blame from themselves to anyone else; then follows the monologue of the mayor, who loudly admits his guilt, but not in what he did, but in the fact that he was mistaken, “mistaking an icicle, a rag for an important person.”
And finally, the search and persecution of the culprits began - Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky. None of the officials admitted guilt or repented, and even Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky alternately address the mistake to each other:
Dobchinsky. Eh, no, Pyotr Ivanovich, you’re the first one...
Bobchinsky . But no; you were the first.
And only when not a single person has admitted guilt, a gendarme appears and deafens everyone with the news of the arrival of a real auditor. The response to the news is a silent scene - retribution, which was called upon by the people themselves, who did not take the opportunity to admit their guilt and repent of it.
Gogol chooses a Russian folk proverb as an epigraph for the comedy: “There is no point in blaming the mirror if your face is crooked.” The author chose this epigraph so that the reader and viewer not only perceive satire in relation to others, but also take a closer look at themselves: is there a piece of these heroes and their vices in me?
Source: Moskvin G.V. Literature: 9th grade: in 2 hours. Part 2 / G.V. Moskvin, N.N. Puryaeva, E.L. Erokhin. — M.: Ventana-Graf, 2016
