In his “Confessions of an Author,” Gogol says: “In the ‘Revizor,’ I tried to present in a mass the results arising from the one crying evil of Russia, as I recognized it in that year; to expose every crime that is committed in those offices, where the strictest uprightness should be required and expected. I meant to satirize the great evil. The effect produced upon the public was a sort of terror; for they felt the force of my true sentiments, my real sadness and disgust, through the gay satire.” The play was received with uproarious laughter all over the empire, but it is a singular comment upon the Russian character of the period to observe that, while it produced so great a furor that the Czar read it with tears of laughter and afterwards handsomely pensioned the author, it led to no official reforms. A single specimen of its dry humor will illustrate. I quote from Turner’s “Studies in Russian Literature.” The prefect is alarmed at the intelligence that his superior, the revising [inspecting] officer, may be expected on any day or at any hour, and begs the postmaster to open all the letters that may in the meantime pass through his office. That exemplary official informs him that such has always been his custom, “not from any state reason,” as he takes care to explain, “but from curiosity;” some of the letters he had opened being so entertaining that he really could not find the heart to send them on, but had kept them in his desk. When reminded by a cautious colleague that this is likely to get him into trouble with the public, the prefect cuts short the remonstration by crying out, “Oh, _batoushka_ [a diminutive term of endearment, meaning practically ‘little father’], don’t you see this is a family affair of our own? What have the public to do with it?” Gogol founded the realistic school in Russia when he produced his masterpiece “Dead Souls,” a work sufficiently powerful to raise him at once to the pinnacle of literary fame. The idea of the book consists of the ingenious plan of a certain Tchitchikoff, who had lost his place in consequence of his misdemeanors in the custom-house having been discovered. In order to retrieve his fortune he visits different landed proprietors and buys from them the names of all their serfs who have died since the last census. Having thus established an ownership, he succeeds in borrowing large sums of money by giving the names of the dead serfs as security, since these dead souls have been legally made over to him. Naturally, the bankers think that they are making the loan upon good live collateral. What becomes of Tchitchikoff, we do not know, for Gogol destroyed the manuscript of the last section of his work--some say, in a fit of abstraction; others, under the influence of religious enthusiasm.