The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Pushkin’s and Gogol’s dramatic pretenders resemble each other in their restlessness, improvisatory skills, lightness, and ability to take on any number of verbal masks with no friction at the transitions. Khlestakov improvises, like Pushkin’s Dmitry, but with opposite valence: he is successful to the extent that he can take value away. The relevant “petitioning” scenes in The Government Inspector occur in Act IV.25 The officeholders of the town, in full dress uniform, haveturnedup to greet –and hopefullyto bribe – Khlestakov, who is sleeping off a sumptuous dinner at the Mayor’s house. At the end of Act III, in an intoxicated bravado, he had regaled the ladies of the house with a ballooning set of fibs about hislife in Petersburg: his dinners and balls, thedepartments that scramble to serve him, his casual visits to the imperial court, his intimacy with Pushkin, how he is begged by publishers to contribute stories and plays (various works attributed to others are all in fact his). Now, sensing no barriers and pursuing no aim, he pushes his identity in every possible direction. Khlestakov gets whatever he can get away with.

In Act IV, the Judge, Postmaster, School Inspector, Warden of Charities, and finally the landowners Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) drop by to “pay their respects.” The judge bungles his bribe and Khlestakov, surprised, picks up the money from the floor and asks to “borrow” it. This success emboldens him. He hits up the postmaster for a loan outright, and with each visitor the requested sum rises. Finally Khlestakov barks in the first breath at Bobchinsky / Dobchinsky: “Got any money on you? A thousand rubles?” Getting away with pretense simply speeds up the scam; it never creates weight, shame, or a public face. Since all parties are equally nervous and guilty, all play the same game of hide-and-seek.

Againstthe advice ofhismanservantOsip (“getout while thegoingisgood!”), Khlestakov lingers, as Chichikov will linger in Dead Souls. The playful masks begin to unravel – and what began as visitors with bribes becomes visitors with denunciations. Our false inspector slips out of town barely in time, just before the postmaster unseals Khlestakov’s letter to a Petersburg friend describing the fools he has fleeced. At this point, a stretch of dialogue occurs that superficially resembles the final moments of the eighteenth-century “self-corrective” comedies by Fonvizin and Knyazhnin, where evil caves in and is exposed to public ridicule. The mayor admits to his gullibility, calling himself an imbecile and blockhead. But Gogol supplies no Pravdin or Starodum to receive sinners’ confessions. Everyone is implicated. “What are you laughing at?” the enraged

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mayor shouts at the audience. “You’re laughing at yourselves!” This Gogol line of pretenders will inspire buffoons, rogues, madmen, and nihilists of a severity and hilarity undreamt of by Turgenev’s pure-minded Bazarov.

Pushkin fully appreciated Gogol’s gift and nourished it. When in 1834 Gogol wrote to the poet asking for a real Russian anecdote to work up into a comedy, Pushkin obliged with one about mistaken identity based on his own experience: the poet loved being on the road and was once taken for a government official himself. But Pushkin’s worldview was tethered to the aristocratic honor codes of his time. Remarkably, his criteria for honor remain stable regardless of the time and place: a military adventurer in 1604 or an illiterate Cossack rebel in 1774. Inhis historicaldrama, Pushkin presents Dmitry as false, but asuseful and enabling to others. Only once, when he tries to be “true” in his confession of love to the Polish princess Maryna Mniszech, does his confidence falter. Pugachov too acts confidently, at times even magnanimously. Pushkin’s pretenders have nothing to gain by running away and there is, in any event, nowhere for them to go; their stories are over.