![]() ![]() The chief magistrate, who is a passionate lover of sport, has his hunting apparel hanging about in the Court, and his attendants have made a poultry-yard of the entrance hall. The patients in the hospital walk about in linen so dirty that you might take them for chimney sweeps. Petersburg, announcing that an inspector-general is coming, and-what is still worse-is coming incognito! Now, the honourable Governor advises the functionaries to put some order in their respective offices. He has had a bad dream two rats came in, sniffed and then went away there must be something in that dream, and so there is he has just got this morning a letter from a friend at St. The local head of the Police (in those times the head of the Police was also the head of the town)-the Gorodnichiy or Governor-has convoked the chief functionaries of the place to communicate to them an important news. "Revizór," in Russian, means some important functionary who has been sent by the ministry to some provincial town to inquire into the conditions of the local administration-an Inspector-General and the comedy takes place in a small town, from which "you may gallop for three years and yet arrive nowhere." The little spot-we learn it at the rising of the curtain-is going to be visited by an Inspector-General. Nikolai Gogol's prose comedy, The Inspector-General (Revizór) has become a starting point for the Russian drama-a model which every dramatic writer after Gogol has always kept before his eyes. The following essay is reprinted from Russian Literature. ![]()
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