There Should Be a Metaphysics of Bureaucracy, a Battleground Between Realist and Idealist Schools...

For such tales as these, along with the stories about dead people registered to vote one hears from time to time, there surely ought to be a genre term...

The story of Lieutenant Kizhe originates in two anecdotes published in St. Petersburg in 1901, in a collection of various materials relating to the reign of Paul I. According to one of these, a copy-clerk's error resulted in a misreading of a name by the Emperor and the creation of a nonexistent Lieutenant Kizh, who was subsequently promoted all the way up to colonel. Only when Paul asked to see Lieutenant Kizh so as promote him to general, did the authorities realize that a mistake had been made. They told the Emperor that Kizh had died. "That's a shame," Paul said, "He was a good officer." In the second anecdote an officer of a company of Dragoons was mistakenly listed as dead, and consequently asked his commandant for a certificate stating that he was alive. The commandant refused, however, not daring to do so after an official order had stated the officer to be dead. Finding himself without rights or pay, the officer petitioned the Emperor, who similarly refused since dead men cannot write petitions.

Bureaucracy becomes a text in itself, a setting for the exploits of nonexistent persons. An author with sufficient connections to insert the necessary 'errors' into official documents might generate the supreme modern narrative; the government's storehouses of Identity could be subverted as the canvas upon which the fortunes of entire imaginary dynasties are played out.

In practice, the game no doubt becomes more fraudulant than artistic: another scam for funnelling money to oneself. I like to imagine, though, that gentleman players would seek to level up their characters, not for mere personal gain, but for the sake of bureaucratic puppeteering itself: an epic tale of struggle between imaginary champions, played out in smudged forms and erroneous databases, and coming to a head in some great clerical Crufts.