Dec 18, 2009

The Government Inspector | Themes

Russian Bureaucracy
As was readily apparent to Gogol's contemporaries, The Government Inspector is a satire of the extensive bureaucracy of nineteenth-century Russian government. According to D. J. Campbell, writing in the forward to the The Government Inspector, Gogol once stated that ‘‘In The Government Inspector I tried to gather in one heap all that was bad in Russia.’’ Through the regular practices of ‘‘bribery and extortion,’’ according to Beresford in his introduction to Gogol's The Government Inspector: A...