About seven years ago I found the novel DEAD SOULS by Nikolai Gogol at a garage sale. I paid one dollar for it. This is perhaps one of my favorite works of literature, even though I've had to read it in translation. Gogol is one of the funniest, wittiest, beautiful storytellers I've read.
San Francisco's A.C.T. was putting one of Gogol's plays on this week. I have read this play which is called THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR. The title sounds droll, I think. But the play is as political as it is funny. From the program notes, it is mentioned that Gogol consulted with Pushkin on the storyline. Nonetheless, the play is, Gogol.
There is a huge ray of light on the characters in the first scene of the play. They are being revealed as bumbly among this brightness, running into each other as they enter the rook that has skewed walls, windows and staircases. The huge grey table in the middle of the state is mocking stage or platform for the politicians of the town and the person they are told might be the Government Inspector who--they had been warned--would investigate their town.
How Gogol becomes a great writer, to me, is his way of drawing links between the players in the play and the play itself. The play would not exist without the players. Gogol draws attention to this connection between the power structure within the play and its concomitant, mundane, "civil" component.
2 comments:
Isn't it odd how certain
nationalities dominate a field?
In the 18th Century it was
Germans/Austrians
with music and the English/French with art.
In the 20th Century it was Russians with Drama and literature:Gogol, Chekov, Tolstoi,
Dostoyevski
whats up
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