the government inspector

The story is really satirizing bureaucracy. The play directly satirizes the complexity and mind-numbing inefficiency of 19th-century Russian bureaucracy, but it has been adapted to become a universal indictment of the hoops that must be jumped through to achieve any sort of satisfaction when dealing with a government office. The infamous red tape that characterizes any bloated hierarchical system is transformed here into an allegorical commentary about the tyranny existing throughout Tsarist Russia as the petty bureaucrats purposely engage the machinery of delay and denial to reign like demi-gods over their localized domains.