Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11524.33 | Fiction literature | 6 November 2010
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The Inspector General
The Government Inspector, also known as The Inspector General (Russian: Ревизор or Revizor or in German Der Revisor), is a satirical play by the Russophone Ukrainian playwright and novelist Nikolai Gogol. Originally published in 1836, the play was revised for an 1842 edition. Based upon an anecdote allegedly recounted to Gogol by Pushkin, the play is a comedy of errors, satirizing human greed, stupidity, and the extensive political corruption of Imperial Russia.
This volume is designed to present biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on Nikolai Gogol's best-known or most important short stories. Following Harold Bloom's editor's note and introduction is a detailed biography of Nikolai Gogol, discussing major life events and important literary accomplishments. A plot summary of each short story follows, tracing significant themes, patterns, and motifs in the work, and an annotated list of characters supplies brief information on the main characters in each story. Gogol's examined works include "The Portrait," "Nevsky Prospect," "The Nose," "The Overcoat," and " Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt."
The Overcoat is the story of Bashmachkin, an impoverished clerk who has toiled for a number of years in an unspecified department within the huge government bureaucracy in St. Petersburg. The tale is told by an unnamed narrator with a tendency to digress and editorialize. Critics have disagreed about how closely the narrator should be identified with Gogol and about how much sympathy the author intended his readers to feel for Akaky the clerk. The tone of the narration is at various times condescending, compassionate, humorous and nightmarish.
Dead Souls (Russian language: Мёртвые души) by Nikolai Gogol was first published in 1842, and is one of the most prominent works of 19th century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book as a "novel in verse". Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol destroyed it shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne's Sentimental Journey), it is usually regarded as complete in the extant form.
