In his “St. Petersburg Notes of 1836,” N.V. Gogol complained about the paucity of the repertoire of the contemporary Russian theater, that the stage was mostly melodrama and vaudeville, and complained about the lack of a real Russian comedy repertoire. His comedy “The Inspector General” was intended to at least partially fill this vacuum. The plot of the comedy, suggested by A.S. Pushkin, was embodied in the play “The Inspector General”. In it, the playwright, with all the force of an accusatory word, attacked the world of evil and violence, showing the entire state bureaucracy of Russia at that time. The play was created in literally two months. And already in April 1836 its premiere took place. The comedy was a resounding success. This was a new and original work in every way. Its novelty consisted primarily in the fact that the comedy lacked positive hero. Indeed, there are no positive heroes on the stage. But the author himself emphasized that there is a positive hero in The Inspector General. And this positive hero is laughter. Laughter that castigates and exposes. But this is laughter through tears.

Gogol's comedy is hilariously funny: it really turned out to be “funnier than the devil,” as the playwright promised Pushkin. But, like an Undertow, a sad, languid and melancholy feeling arises in “The Inspector General”; it rises the higher, the more carefree and easier the laughter of the comedy seems. And finally, in the last, “silent scene”, it breaks out, falling - both on the characters and on the audience - with a powerful wave. Could it be expected that the play, which began as a comedy - with the mayor’s story about two rats of “unnatural size”, with the fussy preparations of officials to receive the auditor, would end tragically - with a terrible stupor of “the whole group”? In his immortal comedy Gogol showed living everyday images in all their diversity. “For God’s sake, give us Russian characters, ourselves, give us our rogues, our eccentrics! Take them to the stage, to everyone’s laughter!” - exclaimed Gogol, and in “The Inspector General” “Russian rogues” and “eccentrics” were presented in in full- bright and figurative. Here are the mayor - Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky, and the postmaster Shpekin, judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin and the superintendent of schools Luka Lukich Khlopov, the trustee of charitable institutions Zemlyanika, local landowners Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, police officers Svistunov, Pugovitsyn and Derzhimorda. Their surnames alone cause laughter, but the laughter is bitter, because they all live up to their surnames by treating their official duties accordingly. Judge Ammos Fedorovich conducts cases in court extremely poorly - a blunder, a Derzhimord policeman - beats up townspeople for any reason or without reason. And so on.

And all of them, while waiting for the auditor, find themselves in a comical situation. The essence of the comedy of the conflict in the play is that the mayor and the officials are fighting a ghost that they created in their imagination (after all, the imaginary auditor is not an auditor at all). But the narrow-minded Khlestakov managed to deceive and cleverly deceive both the highly experienced and intelligent mayor and all his officials.

In The Inspector General there is not even a hint that somewhere, in some distant or near corner of the vast Russian state, life does not proceed the same way as in the city described by Gogol, according to different laws and rules. Everything in the play appears as generally accepted. A terrible, gloomy picture. But in the finale of the comedy, the famous silent scene, Gogol’s thought about future retribution is expressed, the hope for the triumph of justice and law in the person of a real auditor.

Gogol hoped that laughter, the voice of satire, the power of ridicule, the nobility of humor could make honest and decent people out of the mayors and deputies. The seemingly evil lines of his comedy were dictated by his love for Russia and faith in its better future. Laughing angrily at the negative phenomena of life, Gogol forces the reader to think about them, understand their causes and try to get rid of them. That is why the comedy “The Inspector General” has not lost its relevance today. And laughter, as always, helps us survive in difficult times.

The main thing in N.V.’s comedy Gogloya "The Inspector General" is a laugh!

The main character of the comedy N.V. Gogol's "The Inspector General" began to laugh. Gogol began work on his work in 1835. A little later, two premieres of the comedy took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And work on the text of the comedy continued until 1842.

By creating the comedy “The Inspector General,” Gogol wanted not only to expose the bureaucracy with the help of laughter. He dreamed that “The Inspector General” would force officials to change. It was for this purpose that Gogol portrayed all officials in a comic form. The writer believed that ridiculing negative traits characters should have a positive impact on the reader and viewer of The Inspector General. A person, having discovered these vices in himself, had to strive to correct them.

Analyzing contemporary literature, Gogol came to the conclusion that a new type of comedy was needed. He was convinced that comedy based on love conflict had outlived its usefulness. In the 30s of the 19th century, a social comedy was needed, in which important social issues. Therefore, in The Inspector General there is almost no love line. And that’s why there is no positive hero in The Inspector General. Gogol believed that a positive hero would distract attention from the main thing and attract attention to himself. And therefore the writer called laughter the only positive hero of his work. He believed that laughter and the funny have a cleansing function.

Almost everything in The Inspector General is comical. The situation of the work itself is comical: officials county town They are terribly afraid of the auditor and mistake another person for him - Khlestakov. At the same time, they are trying to present their city in at its best, hide the crimes and abuses committed. All these negative phenomena are revealed already in the first scenes of the comedy. Mayor Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky gives orders to officials. We read about uncollected garbage, about an unfinished church, about a quarterly, hastily putting things in order in the city about how Judge Tyapkin-Lyapkin takes bribes with greyhound puppies, about drunken assessors. The postmaster reads other people's letters, there is not enough medicine in hospitals, the reception is conducted by a German who does not know the Russian language at all, etc. Therefore, fearing reprisals, all officials show miracles of ingenuity in comedy.

Gogol took a new approach to developing the plot of his comedy. He attached particular importance to the plot, which at once, in a single knot, was supposed to connect all the events. The comedy also ends unusually - with a silent scene. This scene helps us understand ideological meaning works. For Gogol, the denouement does not end the comedy, but is at the same time a new beginning. This means that the action returns to normal, the triumph of law in Russia is impossible. Although at the end of the comedy a real auditor appears on stage.

Gogol’s innovation in “The Inspector General” was also the fact that “Notes for Gentlemen Actors” were written for it, which helped to understand the meaning of the heroes of the comedy.

Gogol believed that comedy should be folk, touching on the problems of our time. The meaning of “The Inspector General” is clarified by its epigraph: “There is no point in blaming the mirror if your face is crooked.” Gogol himself explains the idea of ​​the comedy this way: “I wanted to collect all the bad things in one pile and laugh at everything at once.” In his work, the writer managed, with the help of laughter, to expose bureaucratic arbitrariness and raise problems state power, legal proceedings, education, medicine. No wonder Nicholas I, after watching his comedy, said: “Everyone got it. And most of all for me.”

N.V. Gogol in his comedy “The Inspector General” shows officials exclusively with negative side, exposing all their vices. A question arises that is difficult to answer unambiguously: is there at least one positive hero in this play? N.V. himself Gogol believed that the only positive character in comedy is laughter: “I’m sorry that no one noticed the honest face that was in my play.... ...This is honest, noble face- there was laughter."

According to N.V. himself

Gogol, when conceiving The Inspector General, he “decided to gather together everything that was bad in Russia.” But for what purpose? First of all, the writer wanted to ridicule such vices of Russian officials as embezzlement, veneration and cowardice. And he succeeded, because the comedy came out “funnier than the devil.”

The most interesting thing is that the laughter in this play is different in nature: in some episodes it is playful and good-natured, but there is also bitter irony and grotesqueness. It would be a mistake to believe that the play “The Inspector General” was written with the aim of making the reader laugh. On the contrary, it encourages you to think about many things.

The author puts his heroes in situations where they show the worst, most disgusting of their properties. And the first of these heroes is Khlestakov. As soon as he finds himself in an environment of general sycophancy, he shows himself “in all his glory.”

He takes bribes and brazenly drags after the Governor’s wife and daughter at the same time. Khlestakov lies so much that one becomes ashamed of him. He begins to behave arrogantly and cheekily.

And the mayor, who no longer understands anything from fear and mutters that the non-commissioned officer’s wife “flogged herself”? And Bobchinsky, turning to Khlestakov with a request to inform the Tsar that “Peter Ivanovich Bobchinsky lives in such and such a city”? All these people are pathetic, insignificant and deserve nothing but contempt.

But why is there not one in The Inspector General? positive character? The main goal of N.V. Gogol - to put the vices of officials on public display, to the ridicule of the whole world, because all this is the most formidable punitive judgment. In the society that the author described, there is nowhere for a positive hero to appear.

Thus, laughter for N.V. Gogol is a means of moral correction of people. And since he can be called a comedy character, he is the only positive hero in it. Laughter affirms the triumph of truth, honesty and justice.

Updated: 2017-12-18

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Laughter is one of the most powerful weapons against everything that has become outdated. A. Herzen One of the features of Gogol’s dramaturgy is determined by its attitude to laughter, to the comic. Gogol is a comic writer in general - both as a short story writer and as the author of the poem “ Dead Souls", and as a playwright. Nevertheless, it was dramaturgy (the comedies “The Government Inspector”, “Marriage”, and then a number of plays united under the heading “Dramatic excerpts and individual scenes”) that most fully demonstrated the comic nature of Gogol’s genius. The comic constituted the predominant aspect of Gogol's dramatic world. From now on (since 1836), Gogol’s constant and freest theme will be the idea of ​​deep spiritual conditioning and the security of laughter. High laughter has nothing in common with the laughter that is generated by a quick wit, a pun, or a deliberate exaggeration. It has its own ethical and pedagogical functions: ridicule of “hidden vice”, maintaining elevated feelings. It is in the comedy “The Inspector General” that the understanding of depth of laughter takes place, its thorough and, so to speak, multi-tiered echeloning: humor, irony, sarcasm, grotesque. It should be noted that comical are those life phenomena that contain inconsistency with the generally accepted norm, alogism. A constant source of comedy in life is unfounded pretension. Likewise, in the comedy “The Inspector General,” the device of error and inconsistency is the basis of the comic, the basis of the conflict. Let us remember the time when the comedy “The Inspector General” (1836) was written: the dark era of Nicholas I, a system of denunciation and investigation was in effect, and frequent “incognito” inspector visits were common. Gogol himself defined the idea of ​​“The Inspector General” as follows: “In “The Inspector General” I decided to collect in one pile everything bad in Russia that I knew then, all the injustices... and at one time I laughed at everything.” Gogol refused to introduce positive heroes into the comedy. And this was a completely deliberate decision. Satirical image life in comedy did not at all mean that the writer had forgotten positive ideals. Quite the contrary, based on these positive ideals, which consist in the emancipation of the people, the development of their strength and prosperity, Gogol characterized social phenomena. It is no coincidence that the writer noted that “the brightness of the collected crimes and vices already draws the opposite in everyone’s head.” The real positive hero in comedy, according to the writer, was laughter. That is why Gogol’s comedic world is emphatically homogeneous. Neither among the actors nor among the off-stage characters did we encounter those who would be “taken as a model” and would signal the existence of a different moral and ethical order. All Gogol's heroes are painted the same color, sculpted from the same dough, they all line up as if in a single and undisturbed perspective. This is the perspective of consistent comedy. Another innovative feature of the comedy should be noted. In “The Inspector General,” the writer boldly took the action beyond the boundaries of family, everyday, lovingly lyrical relationships. The comedy is based on acute social conflicts, which determine its entire internal development. The social practice of the characters appears in comedy as a decisive criterion for evaluation. human qualities. The heroes of The Inspector General suffer defeat not simply due to their moral inferiority, but due to their social failure. The main idea of ​​the comedy is also subordinated to the depiction of the mayor's family, which takes such an active part in the magnificent meeting of a visitor from the capital - the auditor. By the way, it was not Gogol who first introduced the “auditor’s situation” into literature. It was developed before him. But the depth and consistency of Gogol's artistic solution cannot be compared with the solutions of his predecessors. “The Inspector General” is a deeper work. The point of this comedy is not at all to expose a group of officials of abuses. This topic was already sufficiently covered in satire and comedy of the 18th century. Gogol extremely expanded the boundaries of his comedy, in various situations which reflected the most diverse aspects of the entire structure of life in Russia. Avoiding direct accusations, the writer cheerfully and naturally introduced us to the lives of his heroes and showed us what a tremendous destructive power laughter has. Gogol, according to Dobrolyubov, possessed “the secret of laughter.” He knew how to see the funny in social and everyday troubles, in a person’s character and behavior, in his manners, in his language. Humor penetrates into all pores of Gogol's text - its content, style and language. Preparations for the meeting with the “auditor” begin. There is no hint of any establishment of “wonderful orderliness in affairs,” even if it is short-term. All orders of the mayor relate to appearance: tidy up the public places, put clean caps on the sick, sweep the street to the tavern, that is, the one along which the “auditor” will pass. In short, you just need to keep the form. The position of the person being audited did not at all require that any improvements or corrections be made on the merits. The mayor is well aware of this: “As for the internal regulations and what Andrei Ivanovich calls sins in his letter, I cannot say anything. Yes, and it’s strange to say. There is no person who does not have some kind of sin behind him.” But the other side also plays a certain game in the “auditor situation”. This game involuntarily - due to the peculiarities of his character - is played by Khlestakov. Or rather, the mayor and the company are leading her along with themselves - with the help of Khlestakov. The awareness of the “auditor” (“I found out everything, the damned merchants told everything!”), the threat of punishment, the hint of a bribe (“What the hell did he throw!”), the reluctance to speak directly about his mission (“... wants to be considered incognito”) - all these observations serve as proof for the mayor that his interlocutor is playing his role correctly, that, therefore, he is facing a real auditor. Deception, or rather self-deception, of the mayor turned out to be possible because he was preparing to play his role with the auditor, and with the auditor, who, in turn, was leading the game. This was required by the logic of the situation, well learned by the mayor over the years. long years services (“... deceived three governors”). And he had to play with the sincere Khlestakov. The entire episode is permeated with Gogolian irony. The dramaturgy of this very complex scene is developed with pinpoint precision. Here, the direct meaning of the conversation that the characters conduct among themselves, and the hidden one, which, as always, turns out to be the most important, are constantly intertwined. External alogism turns into a very definite logic, completely understandable to the characters participating in the conversation. The mayor and Khlestakov are exponents of the same reality. Both are scoundrels and cheats, although they reveal themselves in different ways. They have a common logic of behavior and language. The incongruities and oddities in the behavior of the capital's guest do not puzzle the mayor in any way, for they are fully consistent with his ideas about how an important official from St. Petersburg should behave. Gogol's characters have their own logic, which does not always coincide with the generally accepted one. In “Theatrical Travel,” with the words of “a very modestly dressed man,” Gogol aptly defined the peculiar comic features of the characters in “The Inspector General”: “... I admit, I felt joy, seeing how funny well-intentioned words were in the mouth of a rogue and how hilariously funny it became for everyone, from the chairs to heaven, the mask he put on.” These words apply not only to the mayor, but also to other official rulers. Just as the mask of hypocrisy and hypocrisy is ridiculous, an irresistible comic impression is made by the immense claims of insignificant people to significance, wisdom and greatness, which we encounter not only in Khlestakov, but also in Lyapkin Tyapkin, convinced of the extraordinary subtlety and depth of his mind, and at Strawberry's, confident that if anyone is worthy of high honors, it is he. And the mayor is ridiculous not only when he pours out in well-intentioned speeches, but also when he smugly boasts of what an important bird he has become, united by ties of kinship with Khlestakov. Trying to show social “vices and crimes” in their entirety, Gogol painted his heroes “ close-up”, boldly resorted to hyperbole, to the grotesque. This is where “couriers, couriers, couriers… can you imagine: thirty-five thousand couriers alone!” Or such characteristics: “Look, look, the whole world, all of Christianity, everyone, look how the mayor has been fooled! Fool him, fool the old scoundrel! (Threatens himself with his fist)…. There he is now singing bells all over the road! Will spread the story all over the world.” Grotesque, in which real life relationships are deformed, verisimilitude gives way to caricature, fantasy, allows not only to expressively, large-scale outline the characters, but also to include them in broad social dimensions. Gogol dreamed of a comedy that would appear " great school” for society and would mercilessly punish with laughter the “tares” of Russian reality. Explaining the meaning of “The Inspector General,” the writer pointed to the role of laughter and satire: “... I’m sorry that no one noticed the honest face that was in my play. Yes, there was one honest, noble person who acted in her throughout her entire life. This honest, noble face - there was laughter...” Gogol emphasizes that he decided to ridicule the despicable and insignificant, knowing that this would cause him the enmity of many. The writer saw in laughter, in bringing evil into the public eye, as a powerful means of influencing society. By this he emphasized the main thing in his aesthetic views, in his attitude towards society. It consisted in substantiating the positions of a passionate defender of the truth, a formidable accuser social evil. High realism closely merged in The Inspector General with satire, satire with the embodiment of important social ideas. Stupid violence and greed, oblivion of public duty and pretentious ignorance, imperious arrogance and cunning sycophancy found in Gogol's comedy bright and deep expression. Her images have had and are having an effective influence on society and continue to live intensely, coming into close contact with many modern social phenomena.