Lieutenant Kijé

Lieutenant Kijé or Kizhe (Russian: Пору́чик Киже́, translit. Poruchik Kizhe), originally Kizh (Киж), is the fictional protagonist of an anecdote about the reign of Emperor Paul I of Russia; the story was used as the basis of a novella by Yury Tynyanov published in 1928 and filmed in 1934 with music by Sergei Prokofiev. The plot is a satire on bureaucracy.

The first appearance of the anecdote is in Vladimir Dahl's "Rasskazy o vremenakh Pavla I" ("Stories of the time of Paul I"), a short piece published in the journal Russkaya Starina in 1870; he reported it as told by his father, Jochan Christian von Dahl (1764-1821). In this original version, a clerk miswrites an order promoting several ensigns (praporshchiki) to second lieutenants (podporuchiki): instead of "praporshchiki zh ... - v podporuchiki" ("as to Ensigns (names), [they are promoted to] Second Lieutenants", he writes "praporshchik Kizh, ... - v podporuchiki" ("Ensigns Kizh, (other names) [are promoted to ] Second Lieutenants". The Emperor Paul decides to promote the nonexistent Kizh to first lieutenant (poruchik); he quickly rises through the ranks to staff captain and full captain, and when he is promoted to colonel the emperor commands that Kizh appear before him. Of course no Kizh can be found; the military bureaucrats go through the paper trail and discover the original mistake, but they decide to tell the emperor that Kizh has died. "What a pity," the emperor says, "he was a good officer."

Yury Tynyanov, who had been researching the period for his historical novels Kyukhlya (1925) and Smert Vazir-mukhtara (The death of the ambassador plenipotentiary, 1928), wrote a novella based on Dahl's story that was published in 1928 in Krasnaya Nov #1. He considerably expanded it, adding several characters (including the historical statesman Aleksey Arakcheyev), and changed the imaginary officer's name from Kizh to Kizhe (using an alternative form of the particle, zhe). In his version, along with the imaginary Kizhe there is another mistake: a Lieutenant Sinyukhaev is wrongly marked as dead. Several sections of the novella are devoted to Sinyukhaev's fruitless attempts to get himself restored (he ends up wandering the roads of Russia, living on the charity of strangers).

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