Шинель

Why it matters

The Overcoat is a story about a man so minor that his office hardly registers him, and about what happens when something he needs becomes something he loves. It reads as alive because it can be funny and painful in the same sentence. Gogol narrates with a teasing, digressive voice that seems to make a joke of Akaky Akakievich and then, without announcing it, asks the reader to feel ashamed of laughing. The setting, a Petersburg of ranks, salaries and winter cold, is specific. The question underneath, how a small person is treated by a large system, is not tied to that city.

It belongs to the early 1840s, the years when Gogol, living abroad, was also finishing Dead Souls (part one, 1842). Critics have read The Overcoat as ‘humanitarian realism’, and Nabokov saw something supernatural moving beneath it, so the story has supported both a social and a strange reading from the start. The line ‘We all came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat’ is attributed to the critic Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé and is often wrongly credited to Dostoevsky. Whoever said it, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Bulgakov and Nabokov all acknowledged Gogol’s influence.

Notice how much the story is told through clothing and paperwork: the coat, the cloth, the office. Pay attention to the narrator, who keeps interrupting himself, dropping the thread, picking it up again, and to the moment his tone changes. Notice how Akaky Akakievich speaks in fragments, and how his one great wish is made of very ordinary things. Alternative English titles include ‘The Cloak’ and ‘The Mantle’, so look for all three. Read it twice: once for the jokes, once for what the jokes are covering.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.