In Nicolai Gogol's 1936 comdey, The Inspector-General (also known as The Government Inspector), Gogol satirizes corruption in Tsarist Russia through a farcical comedy of errors involving the blatantly corrupt government officials in a remote provincial village in Russia.

In "Directions for the Actors," Gogol describes each of the characters in the play and describes Postmaster Ivan Kuzmich Shpekin as "guileless to the point of simplemindedness."

In the opening scene of the play, various government officials of the village are told by the Governor (the Mayor) of the village, Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky, that a government inspector, the Inspector-General, is coming to their town, "incognito" and "with secret instructions."

In act 1, scene 2, the Governor takes Postmaster Kuzmich (as he's addressed in the play) aside and suggests that Kuzmich open and read the mail for any news of the Inspector-General.

Kuzmich replies that he already reads all of the mail, "not so much as a precaution as out of curiosity. I just itch to know what's doing in the world."

Kuzmich has an admirer, Marya Antonovna, the Governor's daughter, who transfers her amorous interest to the young, attractive Inspector-General.

In act 5, scene 8, Kuzmich discovers, by opening and reading a letter written by the person who everyone believes in the Inspector-General, that he's not the Inspector-General but a low-level government clerk who lost all his money gambling and is simply passing through the village on his way home from St. Petersburg.