The Inspector-General | Page 5

the autocracy. Like most born artists, he was strongly
individualistic in temperament, and his satire and ridicule were aimed
not at causes, but at effects. Let but the individuals act morally, and the
system, which Gogol never questioned, would work beautifully. This
conception caused Gogol to concentrate 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 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 writes, "who made me look at the thing seriously. I
saw that in my writings I laughed vainly, for nothing, myself not
knowing why. If I was to laugh, then I had better laugh over things that
are really to be laughed at. In the Inspector-General I resolved to gather
together all the bad in Russia I then knew into one heap, all the
injustice that was practised in those places and in those human relations

in which more than in anything justice is demanded of men, and to
have one big laugh over it all. But that, as is well known, produced an
outburst of excitement. Through my laughter, which never before came
to me with such force, the reader sensed profound sorrow. I myself felt
that my laughter was no longer the same as it had been, that in my
writings I could no longer be the same as in the past, and that the need
to divert myself with innocent, careless scenes had ended along with
my young years."
With the strict censorship that existed in the reign of Czar Nicholas I, it
required powerful influence to obtain permission for the production of
the comedy. This Gogol received through the instrumentality of his
friend, Zhukovsky, who succeeded in gaining the Czar's personal
intercession. Nicholas