his best efforts upon delineation of character. It was
the characters that were to be revealed, their actions to
be held up to scorn and ridicule, not the conditions which
created the characters and made them act as they did.
If any lesson at all was to be drawn from the play it was
not a sociological lesson, but a moral one. The individual
who sees himself mirrored in it may be moved to
self-purgation; society has nothing to learn from it.

Yet the play lives because of the social message it
carries. The creation proved greater than the creator.
The author of the Revizor was a poor critic of his own
work. The Russian people rejected his estimate and
put their own upon it. They knew their officials and
they entertained no illusions concerning their regeneration
so long as the system that bred them continued to
live. Nevertheless, as a keen satire and a striking exposition
of the workings of the hated system itself, they
hailed the Revizor with delight. And as such it has remained
graven in Russia's conscience to this day.

It must be said that "Gogol himself grew with the
writing of the Revizor." Always a careful craftsman,
scarcely ever satisfied with the first version of a story or
a play, continually changing and rewriting, he seems to
have bestowed special attention on perfecting this comedy.
The subject, like that of Dead Souls, was suggested
to him by the poet Pushkin, and was based on a
true incident. Pushkin at once recognized Gogol's
genius and looked upon the young author as the rising