The meaning of the comedy auditor. Social significance of comedy N

The time when N.V. Gogol lived and worked was marked by major socio-historical events. The writer's childhood coincided with the defeat of Napoleon in the Patriotic War of 1812 and Russia's entry into the wide international arena. Nikolai Gogol's youthful years date back to the period when the Decembrists made plans for the revolutionary reorganization of Russia, and then openly opposed autocracy and serfdom. N.V. Gogol entered the literary field at a time of brutal political reaction. His creative activity developed in the 30-40s of the 19th century, when the ruling circles of Nicholas the First sought to eradicate all free-thinking and social independence.
The appearance of the comedy “The Inspector General” in 1836 acquired social significance not only because the author criticized and ridiculed the vices and shortcomings of Tsarist Russia, but also because with his comedy the writer urged viewers and readers to look into their souls and think about universal human values. Gogol did not share the idea of a revolutionary reorganization of society, but he firmly believed in the cleansing power of laughter, believed in the triumph of justice, which will certainly win as soon as people realize the fatality of evil. So, in his play N.V. Gogol sets himself the goal of “laughing hard” at everything that is “worthy of universal ridicule.”
In the comedy “The Inspector General,” the author chooses a small provincial town as the setting, from which “even if you ride for three years, you won’t reach any state.” N.V. Gogol makes city officials and the “phantasmagoric face”, Khlestakov, the heroes of the play. The author's genius allowed him, using the example of a small island of life, to reveal those features and conflicts that characterized the social development of an entire historical era. He managed to create artistic images of a huge social and moral range. The small town in the play captures all the characteristic features of social relations of that time.
The main conflict on which the comedy is based is the deep contradiction between what city officials do and ideas about the public good and the interests of city residents. Lawlessness, embezzlement, bribery - all this is depicted in “The Inspector General” not as individual vices of individual officials, but as generally accepted “standards of life”, outside of which those in power cannot imagine their existence. Readers and viewers never doubt for a minute that somewhere life takes place according to different laws. All the norms of relations between people in the city of “The Inspector General” look in the play as ubiquitous. Where, for example, do officials have such confidence that an auditor arriving from St. Petersburg will agree to take part in the mayor’s dinner and will not refuse to take obvious bribes? Yes, because they know this from the experience of their city, but is it really so different from the capital?
Gogol is interested not only in the social vices of society, but also in its moral and spiritual state. In “The Inspector General,” the author painted a terrible picture of the internal disunity of people who are able to unite only temporarily under the influence of a common feeling of fear. In life, people are driven by arrogance, swagger, servility, the desire to take a more advantageous place, to get a better job. People have lost the idea of the true meaning of life. You can sin; all you need to do is, like the mayor, regularly attend church every Sunday. Fantastic lies, which are in many ways similar to Khlestakov’s, also help officials hide the true nature of their actions. Lyapkin-Tyapkin takes bribes with greyhound puppies and calls it “a completely different matter.” In the city's hospitals, people are “recovering like flies.” The postmaster opens other people's letters only because “death loves to find out what is new in the world.”
It is no coincidence that N.V. Gogol completely reinterprets the traditional stage plot and plot development in his play, saying that “do not rank, money capital, and a profitable marriage now have more value than love?” The true values of human nature for city officials are replaced by ideas about rank. The superintendent of the schools, Khlopov, a modest titular councilor, openly admits that if anyone of higher rank speaks to him, he “has no soul, and his tongue is stuck in the mud.” It is precisely the reverent fear of a “significant person” that leads to the fact that officials, who perfectly understand the emptiness and stupidity of Khlestakov, feign complete respect, and not only feign it, but actually experience it.
Characterizing his play “The Inspector General” as a social comedy, N.V. Gogol repeatedly emphasized the deep generalizing content of its images. The unpunished arbitrariness of the mayor, the dull diligence of Derzhimorda, the malicious simplicity of the postmaster - all these are deep social generalizations. Each of the characters in the comedy symbolizes a certain range of human qualities, allowing the author to show how crushed modern man is, how much ideas about heroism and nobility remain in him. Thus, the author prepares us to understand one of the main ideas of the poem “Dead Souls,” in which he will show that there is nothing more terrible than ordinary, crushing evil.
The image of Khlestakov, whom the author not by chance considered the main character of the work, can also be considered a huge creative success of the writer. It was Khlestakov who most fully expressed the essence of an era in which there is no normal human logic, in which a person is judged not by his spiritual qualities, but by his social status. And in order to occupy a high position, just an opportunity is enough that will take you “from rags to riches”; you don’t have to make any efforts or care about the public good.
Thus, it can be argued that, having brought out generalized types of people and relationships between them in comedy, N.V. Gogol was able to reflect in his work with great force the life of contemporary Russia. Inspired by the ideas of man's high calling, the writer spoke out against everything low, vicious and unspiritual, against the fall of social norms and human morality. The enormous social significance of the play lies in the power of its impact on the audience, who must realize that everything they see on stage is happening around them in real life.

The writer himself believed that the only honest face in the play is laughter. “It’s strange: I’m sorry,” Gogol wrote in “Theater Travel,” “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 was laughter.” Remember his words from “The Author's Confession”: “If you laugh, then it’s better to laugh hard at something that is really worthy of universal ridicule. In “The Inspector General,” I decided to collect in one pile everything bad in Russia that I knew then, all the injustices that are being done in those places and in those cases where justice is most required from a person, and at one time laugh at everything.”
Understanding perfectly the power of satire and laughter, Gogol, with their help, tried to improve the life of society. Particular attention is paid to artistic skill, which is manifested in the composition of the play, the modeling of the characters of the characters and in the very problems of the work. Gogol's comedy is distinguished by its unusual construction. From the first words of the mayor, the action begins,

However, the events that usually precede the plot and are associated with the exposition become known to the viewer much later - they are scattered throughout the play.
The denouement of the comedy is also unusual - at first it is difficult to determine. At first glance, it is planned by Khlestakov’s departure: a proposal has been made for the wedding of the mayor’s daughter, the officials are glad that they managed to deceive the auditor. But the audience knows that Khlestakov is a dummy, that the action cannot end there. Shpekin appears and tells who Khlestakov is. Everyone understands that they have been fooled. The culprits were also found - Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky. Everyone is darkened, the mayor most of all. The action is winding down. And suddenly - a message from the gendarme about the arrival of a real auditor. This was new in the drama of that time. As researchers of Gogol’s work note, “it’s difficult to even decide what we have in front of us – the denouement, or the culmination, or the beginning of a new action, completely different from the previous one. Most likely, both,”
The famous director V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko said: “This finale represents one of the most remarkable phenomena of stage literature. Just as with one phrase of the mayor he tied up the play, so with one phrase of the gendarme he unties it - a phrase that produces a stunning impression, again due to its unexpectedness and at the same time, complete necessity.” Gogol attached great importance to the ending. It is no coincidence that he described this scene in great detail. There is even a drawing of her, which is attributed to the author of the comedy; Having learned from the postmaster who Khlestakov is, everyone is amazed and upset, they feel uneasy. They, such rascals, mistook the “wice” for an auditor, rewarded him, warmed him up, and even equipped him for the journey as a great nobleman. But the worst thing was the new news, from which you can really go numb: a real auditor has arrived. What new things does this meeting have in store for officials, will they be able to hold on to their positions?
“In “The Inspector General,” wrote Belinsky, “there are no better scenes, because there are no worse ones, but all are excellent, as necessary parts, artistically forming a single whole, rounded out by internal content.”
There are two main conflicts in the play:
– internal – a clash between the mayor and the townspeople: “The merchantry and citizenship confuse me.”
– external – between city officials and the auditor. “With this second conflict, the author raises the question of ways and means of solving the main, main conflict of the play between the existing police-bureaucratic rule and the population, although this conflict has almost never received stage embodiment.”
However, it should be talked about, because the writer, as noted above, did not limit his task only to laughing at the district officials. Gogol creates typical characters that reflect the characteristic features of people of the autocratic-serf era. The role of each, even the most insignificant personality in the play is noticeable, because it carries a large semantic load. An example is the silent character Dr. Gibner. His name Christian means “merciful, compassionate,” but Gogol gives him a surname that removes everything connected with mercy: the doctor Gibner is far from the masses, does not spend medicine on their treatment, and therefore in the hospital people “get well like flies” , i.e. they die. It is no coincidence that the surname Gibner and the word “perish” have the same root. Or another example: a non-commissioned officer’s widow who appears for a moment and utters only a few lines, but from them you can create a biography of a person, imagine an entire era.

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“The Inspector General” had important social significance, as a true picture of ignorance, arbitrariness and abuses that were often found in Russia at that time, especially in the provincial backwaters, where people like the mayor and Zemlyanika felt safe from control and could calmly oppress those in power and carry out their shady dealings .

The author himself clearly understood this social significance of The Inspector General, and therefore chose the proverb as the epigraph for his comedy: “There is no point in blaming the mirror if your face is crooked.” But it was precisely this exposure of social shortcomings that caused numerous attacks and accusations against the author, both from people who felt hurt by the comedy, and from Gogol’s literary enemies.

Gogol depicted all these rumors and gossip of the public in a special play, “Theatrical Tour after the Presentation of a New Comedy.” Here, in a number of vividly outlined types, there are representatives of various social strata. Among them there are people who are completely indifferent to comedy and the questions it raises, who have no judgment of their own and are waiting “for what the magazines will say.”

But the majority, touched by the comedy to the quick, talk animatedly about it and attack it and the author with bitterness. The writers (in their person Gogol portrayed Bulgarin and Senkovsky and even put into their mouths phrases borrowed from their own articles) are embittered by the success of the comedy and are called a dirty farce, an incredible caricature.

Others are dissatisfied with the comedy from a literary point of view; they find neither a real beginning nor a solution in it. Finally, most of all they attack the moral and social purpose of the play, and some find its flaw in the fact that all the vicious persons are shown in it and there is not a single noble one, and that the comedy therefore produces too depressing an impression; others find it downright dangerous, suspect the author of a secret intention to undermine respect for the government, and say that for him nothing is sacred, that the whole play is a mockery of Russia.

Gogol objects to all rumors and accusations in “Theatrical Travel”, and in his defense he forces some to speak out
from removed persons; for example, one of the spectators explains the peculiarity of the plot of the comedy, which unites all the persons into one whole, and,
Referring to the example of Aristophanes, he points out the serious social significance that a comic work can have. Another
the viewer, “a very modestly dressed man,” objects to the accusation that the author, by presenting officials in bad shape, had
the goal is to undermine respect for authority, and that his comedy can therefore have a bad influence on the people; in response to these accusations, he cites the words of one of the spectators from the common people: “I suppose the governors were quick, but everyone turned pale when the royal reprisal came!”

Respect is lost not for officials and positions, but for those who perform their duty poorly; in this regard, comedy even has educational value, as it shows that official abuses do not go unpunished. Finally, “a modestly dressed man” expresses the idea that comedy should have a beneficial moral effect on everyone in general, since it should force everyone to look at themselves and ask themselves whether they themselves have those vices that were brought out by the author.

The same idea about the moral and educational significance of art is repeated by Mr. B., who finds that putting social vices and shortcomings on display is a necessary confession and the first step towards correction. Finally, at the conclusion of the play, the author himself speaks and expresses his views on the meaning of laughter and the role of the humorist writer.

Laughter is a powerful force: “Even those who are no longer afraid of anything in the world are afraid of ridicule.” Laughter in comedy is not idle fun: “It deepens the subject, makes something appear brightly that would have slipped through, without whose penetrating power the triviality and emptiness of life would not have frightened a person so much; insignificant and despicable, which a person passes by indifferently every day,” becomes clear, being illuminated by the laughter of the humorist poet.

Laughter has serious educational significance because it forces a person to look back at himself, because it shows that a person can rise above his shortcomings and ridicule his vices.

The task of the humorist poet is to teach with negative images. By ridiculing vice, he thereby contrasts it with the ideal of virtue. He is a doctor of social shortcomings: while ridiculing them, he at the same time mourns the moral fall of man. “In the depths of cold laughter, hot sparks of eternal, powerful love can be found, and whoever often sheds emotional, deep tears seems to laugh more than anyone else in the world”...

“The Inspector General” does not leave the stage even today. Why has Gogol’s comedy not lost its significance even now? Firstly, because it recreates an era in highly artistic images, thereby helping to understand the past; secondly, because even today it is not alien
some aspects of reality and with his laughter as a denouncing force he fights against the remnants of the past.

Comparing Gogol with Pushkin and Lermontov, it is easy to notice that Gogol is different from them not only ideologically, but also in his writing style and literary skill. Gogol himself well understood the features and originality of his artistic writing and defined it briefly but clearly: “Laughter through tears invisible to the world.”

Gogol's humor is not the same in all works. In some cases he is gentle, in others he is angry and even, perhaps, poisonous. For example, in “Old World Landowners” the author has more pity and love for the heroes of the story than a desire to laugh at their plant life; in The Inspector General, mockery clearly prevails over pity for rogue officials; as a result, the reader easily perceives comedy as satire.

In the dead of night of reaction, it sounded like a mercilessly harsh sentence over the entire old, feudal-serf Russia. This
thanks to the fact that Gogol managed to show the most disgusting phenomena in the life of his fatherland with amazing power of generalization and vividness of depiction. The writer’s contemporaries, who saw a terrible abscess in the images of “The Inspector General,” had something to seriously think about.

The question was posed bluntly, and it was necessary to look for a way out of the impasse into which pre-reform Russia had reached. The best of Gogol's contemporaries did just that. Representatives of revolutionary democracy, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, rated Gogol extremely highly, mainly because he was able, with the exceptional power of artistic skill, to tear away from official Russia, the Russia of corrupt bureaucratic officials, all the masks of external decency and show the animal “snouts” of the “resistance”, Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky and other “pillars” of the fatherland. And they were right in their assessment of Gogol.

None of the Russian writers before Gogol came so close to depicting the “vile racial reality,” as Belinsky put it, no one sketched it so truthfully and accurately as Gogol did.

This truthful depiction of life in the conditions of the 30-40s acquired particular importance. Russia in this era stood on the threshold
reforms; the restructuring of her life could only be carried out on the basis of a thorough and comprehensive study of all her sore spots; For this, a preliminary in-depth revision was necessary. Gogol made such a revision when he created his immortal work.

This was Gogol’s verdict on noble and bureaucratic Russia, and this is the artist’s greatest socio-historical merit.
Along with this, it should be noted the outstanding role of Gogol in the history of the development of Russian literature. The direct and immediate successor of Pushkin, Gogol, with amazing skill, continued and strengthened in Russian literature the direction that required the writer to show the truth of life, a wide coverage of reality.

Gogol rendered invaluable services both to modern society and to all subsequent Russian literature. He paved the way for subsequent dramatic writers; he created a Russian artistic comedy. Before Gogol, melodrama and vaudeville dominated the Russian stage.

The melodrama, filled with artificial effects, not only had nothing in common with real life, but was also devoid of any artistic merit. The so-called comedies (vaudevilles, farces, etc.) could hardly be called full-fledged works of art. They were all based on various accidents and extraordinary coincidences. There was comedy not in content, but in situations.

Only in relatively rare cases did the comedy have social significance and was a satire on the structure of Russian life. Sometimes such satire reached very great force. But artistically they stood very low. The characters are usually walking vices that have nothing in common with real people. Gogol put his satire into a perfect artistic form.

In “The Inspector General”, for the first time, such a broad epic image stood before the eyes of the Russian reader, with such merciless
executed with precision and strength, a depiction of Russian provincial life. Stagnant in a stupid, dirty swamp, Rus' was sleeping, and suddenly this
the swamp itself, in all its horror, appeared before the spiritual eyes of the Russian intellectual with the power of the word of the satirical artist. Excitement
unprecedented things began.

They cursed the author, they did not want to believe that the characters in “The Inspector General” were part of the surrounding reality, they wanted to close their eyes to the cruel truth. But everything depicted was too truthful and apt; The artist used laughter as a weapon against the terrible reality. Thus, the ulcers of reality were cured with laughter, and Gogol’s immortal merit lies in the vivid recreation of the whole truth of life.

Comedy N.V. Gogol’s “The Inspector General” has not lost its modern significance to this day. All the horror of the lack of rights of ordinary people, all the arbitrariness
authorities, which the author so vividly portrayed in his immortal comedy, still hangs over Russia like a heavy nightmare.

Of course, the forms in which power manifested itself have changed, but its essence, in itself, which gives the person vested with it the right to arbitrariness, has remained and remains unchanged to this day.

If you think about the sad picture of the state of society that Gogol drew, laughing through tears, in The Government Inspector, and put aside for a while the entire comic side of this “comedy,” you can see the terrible drama of Russian reality, the last act of which has not yet been played.

Social significance of N. V. Gogol’s comedy “The Inspector General”

The appearance of the comedy “The Inspector General” in 1836 acquired social significance not only because the author criticized and ridiculed the vices and shortcomings of Tsarist Russia, but also because with his comedy the writer urged viewers and readers to look into their souls and think about universal human values. Gogol did not share the idea of a revolutionary reorganization of society, but he sacredly believed in the power, purification, laughter, believed in the triumph of justice, which would certainly win as soon as people realized the fatality of evil. So, in his play N.V. Gogol sets himself the goal of “laughing hard at everything that is “worthy of ridicule in general.” In the comedy “The Inspector General,” the author chooses a small provincial town as the setting, from which “even if you ride for three years, you won’t get to any state.” N.V. Gogol makes city officials and the “phantasmagoric face” Khlestakova the heroes of the play.

The author's genius allowed him, using the example of a small island of life, to reveal those features and conflicts that characterized the social development of an entire historical era. He managed to create artistic images of a huge social and moral range. The small town in the play remembers all the characteristic features of public relations of that time. The main conflict on which the comedy is built lies in the deep contradiction between what city officials do and ideas about the public good and the interests of city residents. Lawlessness, embezzlement, bribery - all this is depicted in “The Inspector General” not as individual vices of individual officials, but as generally accepted “standards of life”, outside of which those in power cannot imagine their existence. Readers and viewers never doubt for a minute that somewhere life takes place according to different laws.

All the norms of relations between people in the city of “The Inspector General” look in the play as ubiquitous. Where, for example, do officials have such confidence that the auditor who came from St. Petersburg will agree to take part in the mayor’s dinner and will not refuse to take obvious bribes? Yes, because they know this from the experience of their city, but is it really so different from the capital?

Gogol is interested not only in the social vices of society, but also in its moral and spiritual state. In “The Inspector General,” the author painted a terrible picture of the internal disunity of people who are able to unite only temporarily under the influence of a common feeling of fear. In life, people are driven by arrogance, swagger, servility, the desire to take a more advantageous place, to get a better job. People have lost sight of the true meaning of life

You can sin; all you need to do is, like the mayor, regularly attend church every week. Fantastic lies, which are in many ways similar to Khlestakov’s, also help officials hide the true nature of their actions. Lyapkin-Tyapkin swags greyhound puppies and calls it “a completely different matter.” In the city's hospitals, people are “recovering like flies.”

The postmaster opens other people's letters only because “death loves to know what is new in the world.” It is no coincidence that N.V. Gogol completely redesigns the traditional stage plot and plot development in his play, saying that “do not rank, money capital, and a profitable marriage now have more value than love?” The true values of human nature for city officials are replaced by ideas about rank. The superintendent of the schools, Khlopov, a modest titular councilor, openly admits that if someone speaks to him in a higher manner, he doesn’t even have a soul, and his speech is stuck in the mud.” It is the reverent fear of a “significant person” that leads to the fact that officials, who perfectly understand the emptiness and stupidity of Khlestakov, feign complete respect, and not only feign it, but actually experience it. Characterizing his play “The Inspector General” as a social comedy, N.V. Gogol repeatedly emphasized the deep generalizing meaning of its images

The unpunished arbitrariness of the mayor, the dull diligence of Derzhimorda, the malicious simplicity of the postmaster - all these are deep social generalizations. Each of the characters in the comedy symbolizes a certain range of human qualities, allowing the author to show how crushed modern man is, how much ideas about heroism and nobility remain in him. The image of allsoch can also be considered a huge creative success of the writer.

ru 2001-2005 Khlestakov, whom the author not by chance considered the main character of the work. It was Khlestakov who most fully expressed the essence of an era in which there is no normal human logic, in which a person is judged not by his spiritual qualities, but by his social status. And in order to occupy a high position, just a chance is enough that will take you “from rags to riches”; you don’t have to make any efforts or care about the public good. Thus, it can be argued that, having brought out in comedy generalized types of people and relationships between them, N.V. Gogol was able to depict in his work the life of contemporary Russia with great force

Inspired by the ideas of man's high calling, the writer spoke out against everything low, vicious and unspiritual, against the fall of social norms and human morality. The enormous social significance of the play lies in the power of its impact on the audience, who must realize that everything they see on stage is happening around them in real life.

Save - » Social significance of N. V. Gogol’s comedy “The Inspector General”. The finished product appeared.