star of Russian literature. Their acquaintance soon
ripened into intimate friendship, and Pushkin missed no
opportunity to encourage and stimulate him in his writings
and help him with all the power of his great influence.
Gogol began to work on the play at the close of
1834, when he was twenty-five years old. It was first
produced in St. Petersburg, in 1836. Despite the many
elaborations it had undergone before Gogol permitted it
to be put on the stage, he still did not feel satisfied, and
he began to work on it again in 1838. It was not
brought down to its present final form until 1842.

Thus the Revizor occupied the mind of the author over
a period of eight years, and resulted in a product which
from the point of view of characterization and dramatic
technique is almost flawless. Yet far more important is
the fact that the play marked an epoch in Gogol's own
literary development. When he began on it, his ambitions
did not rise above making it a comedy of pure
fun, but, gradually, in the course of his working on it,
the possibilities of the subject unfolded themselves and
influenced his entire subsequent career. His art broadened
and deepened and grew more serious. If Pushkin's
remark, that "behind his laughter you feel the sad
tears," is true of some of Gogol's former productions, it
is still truer of the Revizor and his later works.

A new life had begun for him, he tells us himself,
when he was no longer "moved by childish notions, but
by lofty ideas full of truth." "It was Pushkin," he