The Inspector-General (Annotated)

The Inspector-General is Gogol's brilliantly corrosive comedy of error, bureaucracy, and moral panic, in which a provincial Russian town mistakes the penniless clerk Khlestakov for a feared government inspector. Written in a swift, theatrical prose of escalating absurdity, the play fuses farce with social satire, exposing bribery, cowardice, vanity, and administrative decay. Its place in nineteent...