Modelling the Reading Act: Gogol'’s Mute Scene and Its Intertexts

Abstract

The mute scene at the end of Nikolai GogoFs comedy The Inspector General has been described as apocalyptic, metapoetic, and pictorial. It begins when the gendarme announces the arrival of the real inspector general to the town’s corrupt officials: their horrified expressions create a protracted, silent tableau, and the audience (having been told in the play’s epigraph and the mayor’s aside that they are looking at their own “crooked mugs”) is left to stare back at the players for ninety seconds. Gogol' expected this scene to be a transformative moment for all of Russia. But exactly how he meant for the tableau to set up a moral-aesthetic event has never been adequately explained.As some critics have noted, for Gogol' images of viewers looking at paintings are a means of commenting on the potential power of art over the human soul.