The
Inspector-General

A comedy in five acts translated by
Thomas Seltzer from the Russian of

Nicolay
Gogol





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
theme. In England it takes nearly all that is implied in
the comprehensive name of Shakespeare to give the same
sense of bigness that a Russian gets from the mention