Justifications of the book being a comedy

Lindstrom explains that the actors of the day, "did not know how to interpret this new kind of comic realism and gave an appallingly bad performance." In the long run, however, according to Campbell, The Government Inspector "contributed a great deal to the evolution of the peculiar Russian realism in acting." Gogol's impact on dramatic realism is also a measure of the use of realistic dialogue in his plays. His lasting influence on Russian literature is in part due to the innovative use of colloquial Russian speech in his literary works. Brown observes that Gogol's plays were innovative in replacing the formal speech of written Russian with dialogue that is "alive with the quality of actual speech." Beresford likewise asserts that Gogol, in The Government Inspector, "incorporates . . . all features of everyday speech" in "dialogue such as had never been heard on the Russian stage before and has seldom been equaled since."