The Overcoat

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, discussing Russian realist writers, said: "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat" (a quote often misattributed to Dostoevsky).

Finally, with the addition of an unexpectedly large holiday salary bonus, Akaky has saved enough money to buy a new overcoat.

The new coat is of impressively good quality and appearance and is the talk of Akaky's office on the day he arrives wearing it.

Finally, on the advice of another clerk in his department, he asks for help from an "important personage" (Russian: значительное лицо, znachitelnoye litso), a general recently promoted to his position who belittles and shouts at his subordinates to solidify his self-importance.

After keeping Akaky waiting, the general demands of him exactly why he has brought so trivial a matter to him, personally, and not presented it to his secretary.

Soon, a corpse, identified as Akaky's ghost, haunts areas of St. Petersburg, taking overcoats from people; the police are finding it difficult to capture him.

Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin: Bureaucrat in one of the departments of the Russian government in St. Petersburg, the nation's capital city.

[2] Wife of Petrovich: Woman of plain looks whom the narrator says Petrovitch calls "a low female and a German" when they argue.

[2] Landlady of Bashmachkin: Elderly woman who advises Akaky to report the theft of his cloak to the district police chief.

Gogol makes light of his fitness for mundane bureaucratic activities by joking that Akaky was always "to be seen in the same place, the same attitude, the same occupation; so that it was afterwards affirmed that he had been born in undress uniform with a bald head."

Bartleby's antisocial, otherworldly and melancholy features make him uncanny and he has been interpreted as a provocateur of existential crisis.

Critics have noted the famous "humane passage" which demonstrates a sudden shift in the narration's style from comic to tragic.

"The narrator's portrayal of Akaky jars the reader, like the young man himself, from carefree mockery to graven sympathy.

Eichenbaum also notes that Gogol wrote "The Overcoat" in a skaz—a difficult-to-translate colloquial language in Russian deriving from or associated with an oral storytelling tradition.

[citation needed] Material goods, in particular clothing, do not merely mask real human character, but can modify a person's identity in a positive and liberating way.

"[12] He also "halted out of curiosity before a shop window to look at a picture representing a handsome woman...baring her whole foot in a very pretty way.

[16] Vladimir Nabokov, writing in his Lectures on Russian Literature, gave the following appraisal of Gogol and his most famous story: "Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift.

But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent.