In a provincial town of Russia, people expect the visit of a government inspector traveling incognito. A broken rogue, who finds resort in town, is coincidentally identified as the inspector. A series of hilarious episodes follow this fatal misunderstanding. Gogol, with his caustic humour, discloses the foolishness, servility, vanity, sabotage, profiteering, and hypocrisy inside the state mechanisms in the pre-revolutionary Russia as well as the decay of a whole society.