Nikolai Gogol's comedy in five acts, The Inspector-General, follows provincial officials who mistake a minor clerk for a government inspector. A satire of corruption, fear, and bureaucratic vanity, it remains a lively and penetrating portrait of small-town Russia.
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Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL A comedy in five acts By Nicolay Gogol Translated by Thomas Seltzer from the Russian Contents INTRODUCTION The Inspector-General is a national institution. To place a purely literary valuation upon it and call it the greatest of Russian comedies would not convey the significance of its position either in Russian literature or in Russian life itself. There is no other single work in the modern literature of any language that carries with it the wealth of associations which the Inspector-General does to the educated Russian. The Germans have their Faust; but Faust is a tragedy with a cosmic philosophic
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