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The Overcoat | Introduction

One of the most influential short stories ever written, Nikolai Gogol's ‘‘The Overcoat’’ (‘‘Shine!’’) first appeared in 1842 as part of a four-volume publication of its author's Collected Works (Sochinenya). The story is considered not only an early masterpiece of Russian Naturalism—a movement that would dominate the country's literature for generations—but a progenitor of the modern short story form itself. "We all came out from under Gogol's 'Overcoat'" is a remark that has been variously attributed to Dostoevsky and Turgenev. That either or both might have said it is an indication of the far-reaching significance of Gogol's work.

Gogol's writings have been seen as a bridge between the genres of romanticism and realism in Russian literature. Progressive critics of his day praised Gogol for grounding his prose fictions in the everyday lives of ordinary people, and they claimed him as a pioneer of a new "naturalist" aesthetic. Yet, Gogol viewed his work in a more conservative light, and his writing seems to incorporate as much fantasy and folklore as realistic detail. "The Overcoat," which was written sporadically over several years during a self-imposed exile in Geneva and Rome, is a particularly dazzling amalgam of these seemingly disparate tendencies in Gogol's writing. The story begins by taking its readers through the mundane and alienating world of a bureaucratic office in St. Petersburg where an awkward, impoverished clerk must scrimp and save in order to afford a badly needed new winter coat. As the story progresses, we enter a fairy-tale world of supernatural revenge, where the clerk's corpse is seen wandering city streets ripping coats off the backs of passersby. Gogol's story is both comic and horrific—at once a scathing social satire, moralistic fable, and psychological study.

The Overcoat Summary

‘‘The Overcoat’’ is the story of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, an impoverished clerk who has toiled for a number of years in an unspecified department within the huge government bureaucracy in St. Petersburg. The tale is told by an unnamed narrator with a tendency to digress and editorialize. Critics have disagreed about how closely the narrator should be identified with Gogol and about how much sympathy the author intended his readers to feel for Akaky the clerk. In any case, the tone of the narration is at various times condescending, compassionate, humorous and nightmarish.

The narrator begins with a fairly thorough introduction of the story's main character, including a broadly comic aside on the origin of his name (which bears a similarity to the common childhood term for feces, ‘‘kaka’’). We learn that Akaky is zealously devoted to the tedious, low-level work of a copyist and that he has been passed over for promotion because the prospect of being given even the simplest editorial responsibility overwhelms him with fear. Akaky's office-mates make fun of him relentlessly, a situation he usually accepts without a word, preferring to carry on as if nothing were happening. In a passage often cited to illustrate the story's thematic concern with compassion and the universal brotherhood of mankind, the narrator describes how one of Akaky's rare outbursts in response to the constant teasing—‘‘Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?’’—affects one of his co-workers:

[T]here was something touching in [Akaky's] words and in the voice in which they were uttered. There was a note in it of something that aroused compassion, so that one young man, new to the office, who, following the example of the rest, had allowed himself to tease him, suddenly stopped as though cut to the heart, and from that time on, everything was, as it were, changed and appeared in a different light to him. Some unseen... » Complete The Overcoat Summary