The Footnotes that accompany our episode on Nikolay Gogol’s classic satire ‘The Government Inspector’, include notes on the source for the plot of the play, Gogol’s reaction to the initial reception to the play, as well as extracts from the playwright’s character notes for the actors.

Not listened to the episode yet? You’ll find it here.

Portrait of Nikolai Gogol by Otto Friedrich Theodor von Möller (early 1840s)

Character Notes
As we mentioned in the podcast, Gogol provides a paragraph describing each of the main characters in a preface to the text of the play entitled Notes for the Actors. For those who do not have access to the text, here are a few extracts from these notes in the Penguin Classics edition of the play.

First Khlestakov, who Gogol describes as a Young man of twenty-three, thinnish, slightly built. Rather dim – ‘not all there’, as they say. The type known in government offices as feather-brained. Talks and acts without thinking first. Incapable of concentrating on anything for long. Speech is staccato; the words fly from his lips totally unexpectedly. The more sincerity and simplicity the actor performing the role displays, the more he will profit by it. Fashionably dressed.

His instruction that the actor play the part with complete sincerity echoes his statement of principle that the “main thing is to guard against caricature”, despite the farcical tone of the play. In fact after the initial production in which Gogol believed that the actor had failed to observe this precept, he elaborated further on how he saw Khlestakov:
“Khlestakov is not a professional fraud or a deliberate impostor. He forgets that he is lying and almost believes his own words. He unfolds himself; as his spirits rise he soars into flights of fancy. Seeing that everything goes well, that people hang on his words, he speaks more fluently, more freely; he unfolds his inmost desires with complete frankness and in doing so, displays himself as he is…Khlestakov does not lie coldly and deliberately, but theatrically and passionately. His eyes light up. It is the best and most inspired moment of his life.“ There’s something attractively innocent about this characterisation, as Khlestakov simply rides the wave of his good fortune.

Gogol describes the Mayor in his Notes for the Actors as “A long serving man, quite shrewd in his own fashion. Although a grafter, conducts himself with dignity. Rather serious and somewhat sententious…Features are coarse and hard, typical of a man who has worked his way up from the lower ranks. Shifts from fear to joy, from servility to arrogance rather easily, like any coarse person.” Although this suggests the Mayor is a stolid, self-serving man, like Khlestakov Gogol does not attribute any deliberate maliciousness in his intent, as he wrote in a later letter: “the Mayor, whose chief concern is lest he lose anything that ‘swims into his hands’. Because of this concern he has not time to examine himself or take a critical view of life, and possibly without realising it, he has become a tyrant, but this is not due to any innate malice or urge to tyranny. He is inspired only by the desire to grab whatever he sets eyes on. He has rather forgotten that in doing so he sets his foot on his neighbour’s neck.” 

What the Mayor and Khlestakov clearly share in Gogol’s characterisation is very limited self-awareness. In fact, I think that that could be said of all the characters, perhaps with the exception of Osip, Khlestakov’s man servant, who Gogol credits as being “cleverer than his master and quicker to catch on.” Indeed, a general lack of self-awareness by the characters may be a pre-condition for any effective dramatic satire, as it certainly is in Gogol’s representative selection from Russian society in his time.