The arrival of the real Government Inspector is the final reversal in Gogol’s comedy: the town officials learn that the man they feared and tried to impress was not the imperial investigator after all. A Gendarme’s announcement replaces their mistaken certainty with an immediate, unmistakable summons, and the assembled company ends the play motionless in a silent tableau.

The Mistaken Identity Behind the Crisis

The announcement overturns an error built from circumstantial details. Piotr Ivanovich Dobchinsky recounts that a young official named Khlestakov has been staying at the inn for a second week, does not pay his bills, and is bound for the Saratov Governorate. The innkeeper also identifies him as an official travelling from Saint Petersburg. Dobchinsky treats these clues as confirmation that the stranger must be the inspector, and the Governor responds with terror and disbelief before accepting the claim.

Khlestakov’s own behavior helps the mistake grow. When the Governor approaches him at the inn, Khlestakov says, haltingly at first and then more firmly, that he intends to pay and expects money from home. Later, his boasts escalate into claims of influence at the center of government: he says that he once took charge of a department after its head disappeared, and describes couriers arriving to ask him to accept the position. The officials hear these inventions as signs of real authority. The Governor even imagines that his supposed connection to ministers and the court might lead to promotion to a generalship.

The Official Summons

In the last scene, a Gendarme enters and announces that an official from Saint Petersburg, sent by imperial order, has arrived and wants to see everyone at once. He is staying at the inn—the same place that housed Khlestakov, whose presence first set the mistaken identification in motion. The announcement supplies what the town has lacked throughout: confirmation that an actual imperial official has come, rather than a stranger inferred to be one from his travel plans and unpaid account.

The demand is collective and immediate. The Gendarme does not single out the Governor or invite the officials to present themselves one by one; the new arrival wants to see them all at once. That instruction makes the whole group, rather than any one official, the object of the summons. The town’s administrative hierarchy cannot shield its members from the moment when scrutiny arrives in person.

The Silent Ending

The announcement strikes the company like a thunderbolt. A cry of amazement rises from the women, and the entire group abruptly shifts position and remains standing as if petrified. Gogol gives the final revelation no answering speech or explanation: the play concludes with the stage direction “SILENT SCENE.” The officials’ sudden stillness turns the news into a visible collective consequence, suspending them at the instant their confident misreading collapses.

The ending also reverses the earlier theatrical pattern. The officials had treated Khlestakov as an inspector and reacted to his every boast as though it carried the authority of the state. Now the genuine representative of that authority is announced, but he remains unseen; the audience receives only the Gendarme’s report and the officials’ response. The real inspector’s arrival therefore resolves the identity mistake while withholding the inspection itself. The final image leaves the town facing the scrutiny it had feared and tried to manage, but shows no outcome beyond the summons and the frozen group.

Dramatic and Social Significance

The mistaken inspector’s power came not from an actual mandate but from the officials’ expectation of being examined. Their fear made Khlestakov’s ordinary circumstances and extravagant claims seem like evidence of rank. The real arrival exposes the distance between the authority they imagined in him and the authority now announced by imperial order.

That reversal sharpens the comedy’s attack on municipal officialdom. Earlier, Gogol’s preface presents the play as a realistic exposure of corruption in a typical town and, indirectly, of graft among higher servants of the crown. The final summons does not show the officials being punished or establish what the inspector will discover. Instead, it ends at the threshold of genuine scrutiny: the group that mistook a penniless visitor for an investigator is left facing an actual one, together and unable to answer.