Professor David Peimer
Nikolai Gogol and The Inspector General
Summary
Born in Ukraine and writing during the “golden era” of Russian writers, Gogol (1809–1852) is regarded as one of the greatest satirists of all time. This lecture examines his brilliant comic play The Inspector General (1836).
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Fantastic question. That is a wonderful one to really think about and look at. If we think about the “Life of Brian” and the effect on devout Christians, “The Satanic Verses” where they’re mostly unread of course, and the effect… It’s that constant tension between the satirist and I suppose the more devout beliefs usually of religion, but it can be of the state or despots. And it’s always a satirist to attack first.
Yes, and that’s what he wrote about in the letter which Sholem Aleichem took up in, that Sholem Aleichem took up. And Sholem Aleichem talks about it. How you combine the grotesqueness and danger, but how you do it through a comic or satirical lens. And obviously “Fiddler” and some of the other stories of Sholem Aleichem.
Yes. That’s what the Czar said, that it’s all human beings. It’s not the system, it’s the human being. That’s why the Czar let the production carry on. Didn’t ban it. It seems to me that nationalism is usually associated with glorifying positive aspects of a country, not satirising the negative. Yes, but to satirise is very different than how you deal with nationalism. So the satirist combines human foible together with the system, in this case, the mass explosion and proliferation of bureaucracy and state power.