was followed by all the great writers from Dostoyevsky
down to Gorky.

As with one blow, Gogol shattered the notions of the
theatre-going public of his day of what a comedy should
be. The ordinary idea of a play at that time in Russia
seems to have been a little like our own tired business
man's. And the shock the Revizor gave those early
nineteenth-century Russian audiences is not unlike the
shocks we ourselves get when once in a while a theatrical
manager is courageous enough to produce a bold modern
European play. Only the intensity of the shock was
much greater. For Gogol dared not only bid defiance
to the accepted method; he dared to introduce a subject-matter
that under the guise of humor audaciously attacked
the very foundation of the state, namely, the
officialdom of the Russian bureaucracy. That is why
the Revizor marks such a revolution in the world of Russian
letters. In form it was realistic, in substance it was
vital. It showed up the rottenness and corruption of the
instruments through which the Russian government functioned.
It held up to ridicule, directly, all the officials
of a typical Russian municipality, and, indirectly, pointed
to the same system of graft and corruption among the
very highest servants of the crown.

What wonder that the Inspector-General became a sort
of comedy-epic in the land of the Czars, the land where
each petty town-governor is almost an absolute despot,
regulating his persecutions and extortions according to