The Inspector General

Word reaches a small Russian town that an inspector general is coming from St. Petersburg — incognito, with secret instructions to expose everything. The Governor and his officials are thrown into panic, for every one of them is corrupt: the judge takes bribes, the hospitals starve their patients, the postmaster reads other people's letters for sport. They must hide the rot before the auditor arrives.

Then they hear of a mysterious young gentleman from Petersburg who has been living at the inn for two weeks without paying. Certain this must be the inspector in disguise, they bow, scrape, and press money on him. In truth he is Ivan Aleksandrovich Khlestakov — a vain, empty-headed, penniless clerk who has gambled away his last rouble and cannot think why the town's grandees are suddenly worshipping him. He has no idea who they think he is, and he is not the man to ask. He takes the money, courts both the Governor's wife and his daughter, and spins ever taller tales of his glittering capital life.

First staged in 1836, The Inspector General is the supreme comedy of the Russian theatre and one of the sharpest satires ever written. Its target is not one man but a whole order of bribery and fear, and its joke cuts to the bone: a society rotten with corruption will invent an authority out of nothing and grovel before a vacuum. Gogol set a proverb at its head as a warning to the audience — don't blame the mirror if your face is crooked.

The play builds to one of the boldest endings in all of theatre. The fraud exposed too late, the real inspector announced at the door, Gogol freezes his entire cast in a silent tableau of petrified guilt — the celebrated “dumb scene” — and holds it until the laughter curdles into recognition. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by Thomas Seltzer, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.