Bill Kerwin's Reviews > The Overcoat

It is a simple tale, on the surface. Akaky Akakievich (literally "Harmless Son-of-Harmless," but which might sound like "Poopy Pooperson” to a child), an impoverished civil servant and scrivener, must maintain his respectability by possessing a decent overcoat. How he gains a new overcoat, loses that overcoat, and seeks to have the overcoat restored to him constitutes the whole of our story.

Dostoevsky has been quoted as saying, “We all come from under Gogol's Overcoat", and it is true that much of Russian literature can be glimpsed in this single short story: it is a satire ranging from buffonery to social commentary, a realist work rooted in naturalistic detail that sometimes descends to the grotesque and the surreal, and yet remains compassionate, maintaining its sympathy for all of us humans and our tragic and ludicrous plight. Not bad for a story slightly more than twelve thousand words in length.

Which brings us to the distinctive characteristic of Gogol: he is a literary conjurer, with an extraordinary ability to shift from tone to tone. The Overcoat begins in low comedy, making fun of its character's name, then describes his shabby living conditions until we begin to see the dead flies and smell the onions. Gogol ridicules his protagonist's rigidity and pomposity, but then—when some younger clerks make fun of him—Gogol shifts his tone again until we grow to regard Akaky with an abiding compassion. From there, Gogol sharpens his social satire, tempering it with a comedy touched with pathos, and ends—not in tragedy, as we suspect it might, but—in nightmare and the supernatural.

We'll let Nabokov have the last word. “[W]ith Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art... When, as in the immortal The Overcoat, he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.”