A man with this job uses false teeth to disguise himself as his dead neighbor, then is tied to a chair until he confesses to being a vampire, in the last play of the Scenes from the Past trilogy. An author with this job satirized it in the play Shadows and the novel Foolsburg before adopting “Aesopian language.” While boasting about his life in this job, a man claims to eat soup delivered from Paris and to have written Norma. The inn room of a man with this job was staged with 15 doors, through which hands holding bankrolls appear, in a 1926 (*) production that developed the “biomechanics” of Vsevolod Meyerhold. In that play, a spendthrift who has the lowest of 14 ranks in this job has his insulting letter read aloud by a postmaster, who freezes with the rest of the cast when a gendarme announces that another man with this job has arrived. For 10 points, people with what career fear the title inspector of a Nikolai Gogol play? ■END■
ANSWER: civil servants [or bureaucrats, government officials, clerks, ministers, councilors, registrars, or secretaries; or answers indicating Russian government, bureaucracy, or civil service employees; accept The Government Inspector; accept The Inspector-General or Revizor until “inspector” is read; accept governors or mayors; reject “politicians” or “generals”] (The play in the first sentence is Tarelkin’s Death by Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin, which was also staged by Meyerhold. The second author is Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin.)
<JB, European Literature>
= Average correct buzz position