hkin 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, ca