Bill Kerwin's Reviews > Marriage

Marriage reminded me of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Not because their plots are similar, because they aren't. Both are farces, but very different kinds of farces. Errors--about the reconciliation of two pairs of twin brothers—depends on misunderstandings for its humor, whereas Marriage—about the arrangement of a marriage—depends on stock characters and their artful manipulation for its laughs. But both works shows us a sort of perfection, but perfection it an extremely basic level. Young Shakespeare and young Gogol both proved themselves with these effective but shallow artifices, proving both to their audiences—and to themselves—that they had the ability to write polished, successful plays.

The first drama Gogol attempted was The Order of Vladimir, Third Class. It was an ambitious work, about a petty bureaucrat who strives to attain the aforesaid order (a mark of nobility), goes mad, and comes to believe that he has been transformed into the Cross of Vladimir himself. It is a great idea—at least in theory—but the twenty-three-year-old Gogol abandoned it as unwieldy, and began writing Marriage the following year instead.

It was a wise choice. Marriage is an entertaining, well-constructed play in which Ilya Kocharyov, good friend of the clerk Ivan Podkolyosin, decides to interfere with the matchmaker Fyokla and bring about Podkolyosin’s marriage all by himself. The ways in which he thwarts the other three prospective suitors—a managing clerk looking for a fat dowry, a retired military officer who wants a wife who speaks French (very fashionable in good Russian society), and a navy man who bores people with his experiences abroad at every available opportunity—are amusing, as are his continual, mostly unsuccessful attempts at encouraging his timid friend Podkholyosin.
It is all pretty conventional stuff—until the surprise ending. I won’t tell you what that ending is, of course. But it was memorable enough that Tolstoy mentioned it thirty years later in Anna Karenina.