The Inspector-General
by Nikolai Gogol
Although it may read to modern audiences like a hilarious slapstick comedy, The Inspector-General is actually much more than that. Famed Russian writer Nikolai Gogol intended it to be a veiled but pointed satire of the ineptitude, corruption, and greed that exemplified the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. The witty play was later used as the basis for a movie version starring Danny Kaye (1949).