# The Inspector General — Character guide

> Key figures in The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol.

- [Anna Andreyevna](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_inspector_general_se/characters/anna_andreyevna.md): The governor's wife, giddy for big-city manners and young men, who reads every glance from the supposed inspector as a conquest.
- [Marya Antonovna](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_inspector_general_se/characters/marya_antonovna.md): The governor's marriageable daughter, caught between her mother's rivalry and her own certainty that the visiting dignitary keeps looking at her.
- [Piotr Ivanovich Dobchinsky](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_inspector_general_se/characters/dobchinsky.md): Dobchinsky is one half of the town's most excitable pair of landowners, bursting into drawing rooms to announce that a terrifying personage has arrived from St. Petersburg. He is a man of frayed nerves and borrowed coura
- [Artemy Filippovich Zemlianika](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_inspector_general_se/characters/zemlianika.md): Zemlianika runs the town's charitable institutions and presents himself as a model of enlightened administration, though his hospitals are as dubious as his morals. His instinct when threatened is to ingratiate and infor
- [Ivan Kuzmich Shpekin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_inspector_general_se/characters/postmaster.md): Shpekin oversees the mail and treats every letter as his personal reading material, a small tyranny he confesses with disarming cheerfulness. He is less malicious than compulsively curious, and his snooping gives him a q
- [Luka Lukich Khlopov](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_inspector_general_se/characters/luka_lukich.md): Luka Lukich is nominally in charge of the town's schools, but his real occupation is managing his own terror of anyone above him in rank. Pushed onto the stage by unseen hands and trembling with his hand on his sword, he
- [Ammos Fiodorovich Liapkin-Tiapkin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_inspector_general_se/characters/ammos_fiodorovich.md): Ammos Fiodorovich administers justice with a pack of borzois under his desk and a shrug about the occasional bribe, considering himself a man of the world. He is the town's most senior official after the Governor, and hi
- [Ivan Kuzmich Shpekin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_inspector_general_se/characters/shpekin.md): Shpekin runs the post office with a smile and a pair of scissors, opening letters less from malice than from an insatiable itch to know what everyone is doing. He is a gossip's gossip, the man who knows which official is

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