Welcome to our Book Club!
Our next Book Club meeting via Zoom is scheduled for Thursday, September 24th, beginning at 7:00 p.m. Portland time. We’ll be discussing The Inspector-General (aka The Government Inspector) by Nikolai Gogol, which is available in book and e-book formats at the Multnomah County Public Library as well as in e-book format online. For links to “Discussion Questions” and the Zoom connection, scroll down the page. New participants always welcome!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright of Ukrainian origin. Born in 1809 in the Cossack village of Sorochyntsi in modern-day central Ukraine (part of the Russian empire back then), he learned in youth to produce amateur plays which his father staged in the family drawing room. This early exposure, in turn, “set the stage” for his own emergence as a Ukrainian folk comedy writer, resulting in his story cycle Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. The success of this work brought him into the orbit of his literary hero Alexander Pushkin, from whom he received the plot ideas for The Inspector-General as well as Dead Souls. Gogol went on to have a colorful life, producing works such as Mirgorod (containing the Cossack epic Taras Bulba and the horror tale Viy) and Arabesques (containing Nevsky Prospect and Diary of a Madman). In his later years he fell under the influence of an Orthodox priest who convinced him to give up literature as a sinful vanity. Gogol died in 1851 at the age of 42, attributed to starvation following extreme religious fasting. His short stories stand alongside those of Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne as founding examples of the modern short-story form.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Inspector-General is a satirical play, based on an anecdote told to Gogol by Pushkin. The biting portrayal of a petty clerk mistaken for a visiting official in a corrupt provincial town is a comedy of errors, satirizing human greed, stupidity, and the extensive political corruption of Imperial Russia. Written in 1836 and premiered at a theater in St. Petersburg, it brought Gogol success and danger in equal measure, as backlash from government officials caused him to flee Russia for Europe, where he would spend the next 12 years before returning home. A loose interpretation of The Inspector-General was made into a movie in 1949 starring Danny Kaye and is PKSCA’s Movie Club selection for October. Please visit the Movie Club page for details.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Click on the meeting date below to join!