"Examiner" with a bouncing

In the club at station N, the performance “Inspector” begins. On the stage are Gorodichny, Strawberry and other characters. The prompter sitting in the booth whispers the text of the play, the actors repeat it. Suddenly, a disheveled man in a French coat appears with a torn collar. This is a member of the club. Actors, trying not to get out of roles, tell him how to find a way out, but he rushes about and gets confused in the scenery. Next comes a member of the club’s board, dressed in a jacket and a red tie. He is trying to grab a stowaway, who, however, protests loudly: “You have no right. I am a member! ” There is clutter, the Mayor interrupts the performance, a member of the club falls into the orchestra pit, the amused audience whistles and calls the police ^{[1] [2]} .

Mikhail Bulgakov, who became an employee of the Gudok newspaper in 1922, said that in the daytime he wrote newsletters about trade and industry, and at night composed feuilleton notes ^[3] . The Beep feuilletonists, as a rule, drew topics from the messages of the rabkor, notifying the newspaper of all kinds of shortcomings. One of the letters sent to the editorial office contained brief information: “In our club, a member of the board grabbed a member of the club by the collar and threw him out of the lobby.” As the literary critic Viktor Petelin noted, one line was enough for “Bulgakov’s imagination to work.” The feuilleton, to which the Rabkorov phrase became the epigraph, was published in Gudka on December 24, 1924 ^[4] .

For Bulgakov, writing feuilleton became a kind of prologue to independent work on works for the theater - satirical miniatures, often representing scenes or small plays, helped him master the technique of the genre ^[5] . They composed with lightning speed (Mikhail Afanasevich claimed that “in half an hour everything ended”) and were close to theatrical improvisations . The amusement and relevance of the genre gave the writer the opportunity to create in the newspaper “the feuilleton theatricalist Bulgakov” ^[6] . When writing short satirical plays, Bulgakov often used classical works, attracting textbook heroes as characters of modern times. Thus, a connection with Gogol is present in the feuilleton “The Examiner” with the knock-out, which researchers call “a tiny variation on the motives of the Examiner.” In this miniature play, Bulgakov not only outplayed the famous plot, but also applied a theatrical technique called “stage on stage”. According to theater expert Elena Kukhta, the appearance of a club member during a performance puzzles the actors, but not the audience, who are confident that Khlestakov is in front of them. But the subsequent release of a member of the club’s board, Khlestakov No. 2, made the audience become accomplices in the action ^[7] .

Gogol's heroes appeared in other feuilletons of Bulgakov. For example, in “ Adventures of Chichikov ” (1922), the revived characters of “ Dead Souls ” ^[8] were sent to Nepman's Moscow, and the feuilleton “How a Bud Married” (1922), written on the complaint of a work correspondent that there were provision tickets in one of the institutions issued only to married employees, beat the plot of the comedy " Marriage " ^[9] .

• Petelin V.V. Mikhail Bulgakov. A life. Personality. Creation. - M .: Moscow Worker , 1989 .-- 495 p. - ISBN 5-239-00644-X .
• Kukhta E. A. Satirical feuilleton theater of M. Bulgakov in The Beep // M. A. Bulgakov, playwright and artistic culture of his time: Collection of articles / Compiled by A. A. Ninov. - M .: Union of Theater Workers of the RSFSR, 1988. - S. 246—259. - 496 p.

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