Almost two centuries after its opening night, Gogol’s five-act satirical play The Government Inspector continues to create a stir with every performance, seemingly no matter where. Maybe because corruption and self-serving double-talk aren’t just familiar features of 19th-century Russia, but have become ingrained facets of all systems of government and officialdom, making them recognizable to Gogol’s audiences whatever their language and culture.
In our own times, truth, justice, and temperance—virtues Plato said political systems needed to enshrine to call themselves “good”—have been shamelessly manipulated, and scamming is normalized, a built-in feature of modern “democracy,” wallpapered on the corridors of political power. Elon Musk haunted recently as a latter-day government inspector, another character who smacks of a Gogolian gag: a shameless imposter pulling rank, beyond the pale, maybe beyond any laughing matter. Gogol probably would have seen it otherwise. He always tried to laugh this stuff off. He’d laugh nowadays, too, doubtless. Searching online for his name, I’m asked: Do I mean “Google”? No, I don’t mean Google.
Gogol freely acknowledged that his friend Alexander Pushkin provided the initial spark for The Government Inspector. “Do me a favor,” Gogol wrote the poet on October 7, 1835: “send me some subject, comical or not, but an authentically Russian anecdote. My hand is itching to write a comedy…give me a plot and I’ll knock off a comedy in five acts—I promise, funnier than hell. For God’s sake, do it. My mind and stomach are both famished.” Though, per custom, Gogol might have nabbed the tale without Pushkin’s realization. “One has to be very wary with this Ukrainian,” Pushkin later cautioned. “He robs me before I have time to shout for help.”
Starting in the early 18th century, government inspectors roamed Russia with the intent of rooting out small-town corruption and mismanagement. Saint Petersburg officials were dispatched to the provinces, journeying incognito across vast distances to isolated backwaters that were usually forewarned of the inspector’s coming. But nobody knew when exactly they would arrive, often not even the inspectors themselves. Over the years, rumors became rife of lone travelers who would try to pass themselves off as government officials, if only to be wined and dined by unsuspecting locals. In 1833, when visiting Orenburg province to research The History of Pugachev, about the Cossack insurrections that almost unseated Catherine the Great, Pushkin himself had been mistaken for a Petersburg official doing his rounds.
Pushkin’s experience was reappropriated by Gogol who touched it up, embroidering it with his own unique slapstick magic, and transformed it into one of Russia’s best-known comic pieces—funnier than hell, as he said. He never gives a name to the town where the action takes place; we know, though, it’s really somewhere, outside the Russian capital, miles away from the glitz of Petersburg, a generic small town that Gogol knew firsthand from his upbringing. “Why, you might gallop three years away from here,” someone says in The Government Inspector, “and still end up nowhere.” In the play, the town’s mayor, an old fogey who’s a little bent, gets wind of the visiting government inspector, expected to arrive any day from the capital. The announcement causes great commotion—everybody knows the district isn’t the most honest.
Gogol’s cast comprises the town’s cronies—the mayor, the judge, the school inspector, the chief of police, the doctor, warden of charities, postmaster, and a few lackies, together with the mayor’s wife and daughter. The mayor frets that shopkeepers and townsfolk will spill the beans on his administration. “They’ve been complaining that I squeeze them hard,” he says, “but as God is my witness if I do sometimes accept a little trifle from them I do it without any ill feeling.” The judge warns everybody that “you better watch out, or we’ll find ourselves in hot water!” Thus the stage is set for the inspector’s imminent arrival, and town leaders cover their backs, gloss over the bribes and petty extortions, sweep the streets, and try to stay sober. “Damn it,” says the mayor, “if the inspector asks why the hospital chapel—you know, the one for which funds were allocated five years ago—hasn’t been built yet, don’t forget to say that we did start it, but it burned down.”
After a while, somebody notices that the young man from the city, along with his manservant, have been running up a hefty tab at the inn. Pretty soon minds begin to run away with themselves. “You know that young gent,” one yokel says, “is an official from Petersburg. His name is Ivan Aleksandrovich Khlestakov. There’s something fishy about the way he’s been behaving. Been here for a fortnight and never sets foot outside the place, has everything charged to his account and won’t pay a copeck for anything.”
And so Gogol’s play advances in vaudeville fashion with a case of mistaken identity, as Khlestakov, a featherbrained, cash-strapped wastrel from Petersburg on his way to cadge money off his father’s estate, becomes the said government inspector. (In Ronald Wilks’s Penguin translation, the script is refreshingly idiomatic and slangy, true to Gogol’s, underscoring the genius of his wordplay and ear for the language spoken by real people.)
When Khlestakov first encounters the town officials cozying up to him, buttering him up, he’s oblivious to what’s happening. It’s his foot servant, Osip, more intelligent than his master, who cottons on, and warns Khlestakov not to milk it for too long before they’re outed as imposters. Get out while the going is good. But Khlestakov has none of it. Hilarious scenes unfold. A spread is put on for him, and he’s invited to lodge at the mayor’s house, shown around the charitable institutions and schools. Bemused, he meets personally one-on-one each town official, touching them up for a few hundred rubles here and there, for which they gladly oblige. Before long, Khlestakov grows into the role, begins to believe in his own lofty status, starts laying it on thick about his importance as a departmental head, honored and respected by the Tsar, hobnobbing with his “old pal” Pushkin.
The townsfolk are enamored by such an illustrious personage; and, like Chichikov, that other imposter from Dead Souls (a tale, incidentally, also sparked by Pushkin), fawn over him, anointing their own egos in the process. Khlestakov winds up the mayor’s wife, flirts with her, then glibly proposes to their daughter Marya, playing and preying on everyone’s delusions of grandeur. The mayor tells the town’s storekeepers, who’ve hitherto been griping about the squeeze the mayor put on them: “I’m not marrying my daughter off to some little jerk, but to a man of the likes of whom the world has never seen, a man who can do anything. Anything!”
Sounding a little like someone in office we know, wreaking revenge on all and sundry who’ve crossed him, “I’ll teach those sneaky bastards complaining about me, eh,” the mayor says, “I want the names of all those who’ve been moaning about me—especially those filthy scribblers who concocted petitions for them.” He calls a meeting of the town officials, announcing to everyone how his luck has changed, how from now on he and his wife will be installing themselves in a plush Petersburg pad, mingling in higher circles, with aristocrats, and that his new son-in-law will ensure he’s promoted to some important post. The mayor’s wife is already bragging about her husband becoming a general, grumbling that “the air here is, I must say, so very provincial” (Gogol’s emphasis). Meanwhile, Khlestakov and Osip split the scene, supposedly exit on business, vowing to return the next day, or the day after that—but we know it’s not true.
The fantasy world Gogol creates comes crashing down when the postmaster rushes in with an opened letter in his hand, written by Khlestakov, addressed to a journalist friend of his in Petersburg. It was about to be dispatched special delivery, yet the postmaster couldn’t resist peeking inside it, breaking the seal, and reading its contents. “I was driven by some supernatural force,” he says. “I was about to send it off, but curiosity the likes of which I’d never felt before got the better of me. ‘I can’t open it, I can’t’, I thought, but then something kept tugging at me, drawing me on.”
The mayor is livid: “How dare you open the private letter of such a powerful personage!” “Well, that’s just it,” the postmaster says, “he’s not powerful at all and he’s not even a personage! He’s a complete nobody, just a little squirt.” Reading the letter aloud, the postmaster says: “the whole town took me for some governor general…. You’d die laughing—they’re all such dreadful freaks. Now, those little sketches you write for the magazine—why not stick them in? Take the mayor, for example. He’s as stupid as a mule.”
It all hits like a bombshell. “Well,” says the mayor, head in hands, “he’s finished me off! I’m a broken man, played out. All I can see are pigs’ snouts everywhere instead of faces.” Everyone is bewildered. Then the judge wonders, asking a question that is perhaps the whole point of Gogol’s play, maybe even the whole problem with contemporary politics: “How did it happen, gentlemen? How could we have blundered like that?”
“See how your mayor’s been duped,” says the mayor to himself. “Fool! Imbecile! Blockhead! [Shaking his fist at himself.] You thick-nosed idiot—taking that little squirt, that bloody pipsqueak for a powerful personage.”
I can just picture him [Khlestakov] now, bowling along to the sound of jingling bells, letting the whole world know about it! And if that’s not bad enough being a laughingstock already, along will come some hack, some miserable pen-pusher and stick us all in a comedy…. Ooh—you lot! I’d like to get my hands on all you blasted scribblers. Ooh, you lousy hacks, damned liberals, devil’s spawn! That’s what really hurts! The scribbler won’t give a rap for rank or reputation as long as the audience grins from ear to ear and claps his hands. [Stamps furiously on floor.] What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves, that’s what!
These lines were Gogol’s coup de grace, words that in the performance of The Government Inspector the mayor turns to the audience, addressing their laughter. It was Gogol’s killer ploy. As audiences watched a tale of corruption and misdeeds in office, they found themselves implicated in the plot, bearing the brunt of Gogol’s jokes, of his lampooning and pillorying. In laughing at the mayor, they were laughing at themselves, and this, for Gogol, was the crux of his comic theater: the shock of recognition.
Gogol’s famous finale act is his so-called “Dumb” (or “Mute”) scene. A gendarme enters the stage, just as the mayor has taunted the audience, proclaiming the following news: “The official who has just arrived from St. Petersburg by Imperial command requires your presence at the inn immediately. [These words strike like a thunderbolt. All the ladies cry out at once in astonishment. The whole group suddenly changes position and stands as if turned to stone.]” Each actor assumes a speechless pose, arms stretched out, heads thrown back; others squat on the floor or stand toward each other, mouths gaping, eyes popping, transformed into pillars. “The petrified group maintains this position for about a minute and a half. [Curtain.]”
Laughing and thinking
When Gogol wrote his notes on The Government Inspector, his “after-thoughts” upon fleeing Russia in 1837, he’d corrected several scenes, added and subtracted from his original text. He’d especially reworked Act V, disappointed by how poorly the dénouement had been interpreted in earlier performances, rectifying it with instructions about its proper enactment. He didn’t like the over-the-top vaudeville nature of the acting and scripting, either. He wanted a comedy that was genuinely funny, yet somehow deep, its laughter profound—it wasn’t mere amusement he wanted to create, something entertaining only for an evening out.
Gogol was clear that the play shouldn’t be over-acted. “Beware of falling into caricature,” he says. It was message for his actors. “The actor,” he says,
must make a special effort to be more modest, unpretentious, and dignified than the character he is playing. The less the actor thinks about being funny or making the audience laugh, the more the comic elements of his part will come through. The ridiculous will emerge spontaneously through the very seriousness with which each character is occupied with his own affairs…Only the audience, from its detached position, can perceive the vanity of their concerns. But they themselves [the actors] do not joke at all and have no inkling that anybody is laughing at them.
The character of Khlestakov, the bogus inspector, bothered Gogol most of all. While an evident mediocrity, frivolous and deceitful, Khlestakov is also cunning and malicious. There is, in short, something sinister about him. To create him solely as a laughingstock is to miss the point, miss the menace of a character who isn’t only a buffoon and clown. He is that, too, of course. And yet, says Gogol, Khlestakov “doesn’t bluff. He forgets he’s lying and believes what he says. He has become expansive…people are listening to him…. He’s sincere, completely frank, and in telling lies shows the stuff he’s made of…he lies with calculation, like a theatrical braggard; he lies with feeling; his eyes convey the pleasure it gives him.” Khlestakov is a “man who tells cock-and-bull stories enthusiastically, with gusto, who’s unaware how words spring from his lips, who, at the very moment he’s lying, has absolutely no idea that he is doing so. He merely relates his perpetual fantasies, what he would like to achieve, as if these fantasies of his imagination had already become reality.” It sounds disturbingly like somebody we know, the head of a large country vowing to make it great again.
Gogol says he chose an anonymous town for the play, a town of the imagination, largely because dishonesty and double-talk is everywhere in human society. The real point here is the consummate ease with which political systems can be hijacked and debased, replaced by a pretense wherein higher up officials, as well as lower down minions, feather their own nests, line their pockets with favors and finance. Scamming becomes institutionalized at all levels, the functioning logic of the system itself, so widespread that it gets embedded in everybody’s minds. Honesty gets you nowhere. The only honorable character, says Gogol, is laughter. Indeed, laughter for Gogol is the sole positive character in the play. But then again, whose laughter? What are you laughing at? Well, you’re laughing at yourselves, that’s what—or else you should be. “Let us banish corruption from our souls!” says Gogol. “There exists a weapon, a scourge, that can drive it out. Laughter, my worthy countrymen! Laughter, which our base passions fear so! Laughter, created so that we might deride whatever dishonors the true beauty of humans.”
Could there ever be real laughter and the shock of recognition again in theater? Is there still some way art the likes of which Gogol wrote can be performed to help transform how people think about politics and our political leaders—about ourselves? Is there a point in our lives when the shock of recognition signals enough is enough and that this absurdity on stage, in our political life, has to stop, that we’ve been duped by imposters for long enough now, that it’s high time we laugh at them and laugh at ourselves for believing them, for applauding their antics in mass adulation. Maybe what Gogolian theater can bring us isn’t just the shock of recognition but misrecognition: those lies aren’t going to reach their ideological target anymore; we can fend them off by not recognizing ourselves in them.
In this respect, misrecognition becomes vital, the reluctance of spectators to identify with the spectacle being watched. There’s no complicity between the two, no pity or sentimentality, no anger or disgust—only a sort of distancing that counteracts any possible emotional empathy audiences develop with the characters. Gogol never lets this happen. His scenes move too rapidly, never let anybody reflect. There are no heroes in his plays, no moralizing, no dichotomy between good guys and bad guys, between the deviants and the virtuous; rarely is there a moment on stage when sanity prevails, when everybody seems on solid ground.
Gogol wants laughter to prompt a thinking response from his audiences, laughter that fosters not hot feeling outburst but critical interpretation. Maybe this critical interpretation comes afterward, after the audiences go home. Gogol was a fan of Aristophanes’ drama yet sought no classical ideal of theater, where repressed energy erupts into what Aristotle called catharsis—a stirring emotional release, usually at the play’s finale. That all sounds like the din of demagogic rage. Gogol wants to snub any hyperbolic triumph. In laughing at the cast, and in laughing at oneself, a public might cease to identify with what they’re watching. They might find a critical position on the outside and not get taken in on the inside. It’s precisely this critical distance that needs to be carried over into real life, where it might promote a more resilient human value.
Rescripting Gogol
In 2025, one can’t help but think of a rescripting of The Government Inspector. The daily news makes ugly reading and yearns to bring Gogol’s play back to life—daily news about DOGE and its shenanigans, about its falsehoods and scams. Muskesque government inspectors slash and burn federal coffers, ax workforces, eliminate social security agencies and overseas development organizations, seize control of technology across government agencies, dismantle regulatory frameworks, close down helplines and the Financial Protection Bureau, stripping away safeguards against ordinary people getting ripped off, even ruined. Even the name “Department of Government Efficiency” sounds like a nineteenth-century Gogolian throwback! Remember how he starts his story The Overcoat, “in one of the government departments, but perhaps I better not say exactly which one. For no one’s touchier than people in government departments, or, in short, any kind of official body…. And so, to avoid any further unpleasantness, we had better call the department in question a certain department” (Gogol’s emphases).
When I say “rescripting” of Gogol, I mean role reversal. What if the whole logic of Gogol’s play is reversed? What if the townsfolk, the public, were honest, doing their jobs, maybe dragging their feet a bit here and there, making errors at the workplace and in life—but basically upright and conscientious. Instead, it’s the government inspectors of a certain department who are corrupt, who’re on the make, who’re the real imposters. They have no real mandate; it’s a sham that they’re able to wield power. Everybody they hunt down is legitimately scarred, running around and wanting to show everything in the best light, even while privately knowing they’ve nothing to hide. The arbitrariness of the system comes from the top, from the alleged government inspectors, from “officials” without official credentials, their edict ideologically driven to root out political opposition. Wastage and efficiency are ruses to cost-cut and dismantle the public sector, that as they turn a blind eye to corporate welfare. (Elon Musk’s business empire—Tesla, SpaceX, etc.—has sucked up thirty-eight billion dollars of government funding in one shape or another, through contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits.)
“Rescripting” means retitling Gogol’s play The Citizen Inspector. A message resounds through the corridors of a certain department, that an audit is going to take place, a people’s audit, that a representative of the people, of the tax paying public, “The Citizen Inspector,” will be arriving anytime, soon, to monitor corruption and to root out the inefficiency of DOGE “efficiency.” They’ll be delving into the books and accounts of this faraway unaccountable office buried in the bowels of this certain Washington department. On behalf of the people, the Citizen Inspector demands absolute transparency and cooperation.
One suspects that the comic antics of the play would derive from the natural idiocy of the cast involved, by its bumpkin nature, that DOGE is running around not really knowing what they’re doing—or else maybe they know full well what they’re doing and it’s precisely that which is the sick joke, a gag Gogol could tell well. Laugher would arise from the serious absurdity they proclaim. In the end, we can laugh aloud at the cast and laugh at ourselves for letting ourselves be taken in by this cast. (Was anybody really taken in?) We’ll die laughing at such dreadful freaks. At the play’s finale, they’ll be another dumb scene. A petrified group of “officials” maintains its position for a minute and a half; a gendarme has just stormed in announcing the illegality of their activities, and that all are summoned before the People’s Court to be tried for crimes against humanity…