[Project] The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol

[Asher Smith]

Having been a little burned out from George Bernard Shaw by Back to Methuselah (I mean really, who wants to read thirty thousand words of a preface arguing for Lamarckian evolution written several decades after Darwin became popular?), my next project will be The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol.

First things first, before I make a repo or anything, is the question of the name of the play. In modern English, it is generally called The Government Inspector or The Inspector General. I'm going to go with the latter because, as far as I can tell, it is more common historically and it happens to be the title under which the PG edition is published. I will include the other as an alt title in the content.opf file. I propose not to hyphenate it as the PG edition is as per MW. In any case, all of those are loose translations of Ревизор, which literally means Inspector or Auditor. One question: should I also include a transliteration of the Russian (The Revizor) and the original Russian itself as alt titles/alt scripts in the metadata?

There seem to be two serious options for translations in the PD, by Arthur A. Sykes and Thomas Seltzer. The Seltzer one is more modern, from 1916, and it reads much smoother/better to me. It is also the one that PG uses, which is convenient. This translation has an introduction written by the translator that offers a potted history of the play and its writing; I propose to cut it. There is a dramatis personae that has some "together" style formatting that I've not seen in a dramatis personae before and that I'm not sure how best to replicate, but that I suspect I will do with wording and <br/> elements rather than CSS. There is also a "Directions for Actors" piece of frontmatter that has come from the original Russian, so will be included.

It's a five act play with multiple scenes in all acts; I'll use the same sectioning for these that I did in Shakespeare. There are also two additional scenes at the end that in the PG edition seem to have the semantic weight of acts, but in the IA scans seem to be scenes within Act V, so I'll put them within act-5.xhtml.

Does that all seem sensible?