A bell rings during ‘The Government Inspector’: an evening at Gogol’s house

Gogol had not yet reached the middle of the first act of The Government Inspector when the drawing-room door swung open. A young man crossed the room and sat down in a corner. According to Ivan Turgenev’s recollection, Gogol stopped reading, rang the bell, reminded the servant that he had asked for no more visitors to be admitted, drank some water and returned to the play. This happened at the house on Nikitsky Boulevard where actors and writers had gathered on 5 November 1851. Turgenev did not name the newcomer. The guest’s own account of that evening has survived.

Today, this is Gogol House at 7a Nikitsky Boulevard. That autumn Nikolai Gogol, whose story is also told on the Arbat tour, was living with Count Alexander Tolstoy at the Talyzin estate. His two rooms were to the right of the entrance, in an extension dating from the early nineteenth century. The reading took place in another part of the house: Danilevsky, one of those present, placed it in the second room of the Tolstoys’ apartment, to the left of the entrance hall. A table stood by a window overlooking the courtyard; Gogol sat on a sofa, with the guests seated nearby. Among the listeners were actors who had already performed the play in public.

Two weeks before the reading, Turgenev saw The Government Inspector at the Maly Theatre. On 22 October, Sergei Shumsky appeared as Khlestakov for the first time; Gogol was also in the audience. Turgenev remembered the author sitting near the door of a box, behind two ladies. The researcher Irina Zaitseva established the date by comparing theatre records with a newspaper report. In a later recollection, Turgenev gave the wrong date for his next visit to Gogol, but the sequence of events is clear: first the performance, then a conversation at the Tolstoys’ house, followed by the author’s reading.

After the performance

Turgenev visited Gogol with Mikhail Shchepkin. They found their host at a standing desk, pen in hand. Turgenev described a dark coat, a green velvet waistcoat and brown trousers. He had expected to meet a taciturn man, but Gogol spoke animatedly and at length: about the work of writing, literature, and then the theatre. Disagreements arose between them, which Turgenev later wrote about candidly. This private conversation gave rise to the idea of an evening to which actors would be invited.

Gogol told his guests that the performers had lost the tone of The Government Inspector and offered to read the play from beginning to end. Shchepkin immediately helped arrange the reading. He had long played the Mayor and knew the comedy from the stage. Turgenev heard the proposal after a performance featuring a new Khlestakov: the play, written fifteen years earlier, was still seeing changes in its cast. Now the author intended to let the actors hear his own rendition.

No theatre stage was needed for this. The words of the play remained the same, but one man set the pace and the pauses. Turgenev, who had heard the recent performance, had the chance to compare two renditions. Among those invited were Shchepkin, familiar with the role of the Mayor, and Shumsky, who had recently played Khlestakov for the first time. At the Tolstoys’ house, they heard Gogol read The Government Inspector.

The people around the table

On 5 November, the listeners included Shchepkin, Shumsky and other actors, as well as Turgenev, Stepan Shevyryov, Sergei Aksakov and Ivan Aksakov. Turgenev noted that not all the invited actors had come, and that no actresses were present. He offered his own conjecture about why some had declined: the author’s proposal might have seemed like a lesson to those who already performed the roles. Danilevsky listed those present, but did not say who had been invited or who had declined. Before Gogol sat some of the theatre people for whom he had conceived the reading.

Danilevsky recorded details of the room’s layout: a table to the right of the door, a sofa beside the table, and windows overlooking the courtyard. Armchairs and chairs stood around the table. Turgenev remembered Gogol’s face before the reading began: he felt that the actors’ lukewarm response had upset the writer. Then, as Gogol began to read, Turgenev saw him come to life. Around him were people who knew the play from the stage and others who remembered it from the book.

Turgenev expected Gogol to act out each character, but instead heard a restrained reading. The funny passages made the guests laugh; Gogol himself, Turgenev observed, did not press them for a reaction. Turgenev compared him with Dickens, who read his own works almost like an actor. What struck him about Gogol’s manner was its simplicity. Danilevsky, seated in the same room, remembered a more animated reading and singled out the monologues of Khlestakov and Lyapkin-Tyapkin. The two accounts preserved the impressions of different listeners.

The opening of The Government Inspector gave Turgenev one precise example. The Mayor spoke of a dream about two rats; Gogol delivered this absurd detail with bewilderment and looked around at his listeners. Turgenev realised that humour could arise without being forced, from the Mayor’s own seriousness. He recalled stage performances in which actors hurried to turn this line into a laugh. In the drawing room, the same phrase lingered a moment longer. This was how Turgenev heard the author’s sense of timing in a familiar scene.

Gogol continued reading. Turgenev followed the way his calm delivery sustained the strangeness of events on stage: the officials believed their own fears, and Khlestakov his own chatter. Danilevsky would later recall the conversation between Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky too. Each listener left the room remembering the passages that had caught their attention. Before the sudden entrance, Turgenev had been so absorbed in the reading that the interrupted scene became a dividing line in his recollection.

The late guest

The door opened when, by Turgenev’s reckoning, Gogol had not yet read half of the first act. A young writer crossed the room and sat down in a corner. Gogol stopped, rang for the servant and reminded him that no new guests were to be admitted. Then he drank some water and continued. Turgenev regarded the arrival as an intrusion: after the pause, he heard a more hurried, quieter reading and noticed words being omitted. The late visitor remained unnamed in his account, but his behaviour was judged harshly.

The scholarly commentary on Turgenev’s recollections identifies the newcomer as Grigory Danilevsky. Danilevsky explained in detail how he came to the house. On the evening of 5 November, he visited the Aksakovs on Povarskaya Street; there, a servant passed on an invitation to the reading from Sergei and Ivan Aksakov, at Gogol’s request. Danilevsky hurried to Nikitsky Boulevard and entered the room after the reading had begun. His account makes no mention of the bell or the remark to the servant. Turgenev saw a disturbance of the silence; Danilevsky considered himself an invited guest. This difference changes the meaning of the word ‘uninvited’.

In his recollection, Danilevsky quotes a letter dated 4 November asking him to call on the Aksakovs. According to his own account, it was only once he was there that he received the invitation to Gogol’s house. The scholarly commentary also quotes a letter he wrote shortly after the evening: in it, Danilevsky likewise says that Gogol had invited him. Arriving late and having an invitation are therefore not contradictory. But the witnesses gave different accounts of what exactly caused the abrupt interruption of the reading.

During Khlestakov’s monologue, Turgenev observed, Gogol’s voice grew stronger again. Turgenev linked the change to Shumsky: the actor had recently taken on the role, and the author wanted to demonstrate a difficult passage. To Turgenev, Gogol’s Khlestakov seemed a man carried away by his own boasting. Danilevsky also singled out this monologue as one of the evening’s highlights. Even after the pause, the reading gave the actors reason to discuss the role.

After the reading

Danilevsky wrote that Gogol reached the scene with the letter and rose from the sofa. The listeners stood in groups, quietly exchanging impressions. Shchepkin embraced the author, then began explaining to Shumsky the main forces driving the role of Khlestakov. Turgenev retained a different impression: in his memory, the reading after the intrusion became merely a ‘sketch’, as Gogol himself put it in Turgenev’s account. Danilevsky described how far Gogol had read; Turgenev described how he remembered the rendition.

Turgenev never saw Gogol again after that evening. Danilevsky, by contrast, stayed after the other guests had left; his recollection continues the story of the house beyond the door of the room where the play was read. But for the reading itself, the important moment took place by the table. Shchepkin began speaking to the new Khlestakov as soon as Gogol rose from the sofa. Danilevsky described the substance of the conversation but did not record the words. The rendition they had heard became the subject of a discussion between two actors while the author was still beside them.

The house on Nikitsky Boulevard later changed its appearance: in 1876, the wooden upper storey was replaced with masonry, and the façade facing the boulevard was redesigned. The rooms as they are today cannot be taken for the untouched drawing room of that November evening. Yet the accounts of two listeners have survived, and even their judgements of a single guest differed. Turgenev took away what he felt was an unfinished ‘sketch’; Danilevsky remembered the scene with the letter and Shchepkin’s conversation with Shumsky. Gogol had finished reading. The actors were still talking about Khlestakov.

Sources

1. I. S. Turgenev. ‘Gogol’
2. G. P. Danilevsky. ‘Meeting Gogol’
3. I. A. Zaitseva. ‘Around “The Government Inspector”’
4. V. P. Vikulova. ‘Gogol’s House on Nikitsky Boulevard: A Historical and Architectural Chronology’
5. L. N. Nazarova. Commentary on I. S. Turgenev’s recollections of Gogol