Эпиграфом к пьесе поставлена русская пословица: "На зеркало неча пенять, коли рожа крива". Гоголь, конечно, никогда не рисовал портретов, он пользовался зеркалами и как писатель жил в своём зеркальном мире... Даже в худших своих произведениях Гоголь отлично создавал своего читателя, а это дано лишь великим писателям. (The Inspector has a Russian saying for epigraph: "Seeing ugly face, one should not blame the mirror." Gogol never drew portraits, he used mirrors and lived as a writer in his looking-glass world... Even in his worst works Gogol perfectly created his reader, and only great writers can do that. Apologies for my back translation from the Russian)

VN's play The Event (whose main character is a portrait painter Troshcheykin) abounds in allusions to The Inspector. But, unlike Gogol's comedy, The Event has no epigraph. It is we, the readers (whom VN creates, just as Gogol and other great writers create their readers), who should fill in the gap by adding the epigraph (another saying that happens to be the play's solution):