RICHARD MOORE
Gogol's "Overcoat"
"We have all come out of the folds of 'The Overcoat."
Dostoyevsky's remark suggests the decisive importance of Gogol's
great story for the flowering of Russian fiction in the nineteenth century.
But what is it, that "Overcoat"? It has seemed to change remarkably
over the years. For Belinsky and other critics when it first appeared, the
story seemed a humanitarian cry for sympathy for the downtrodden. In
his paragraph of summation after his hero's death, Gogol himself seems
to take this view:
So vanished and disappeared for ever a human being whom no one
ever thought of protecting, who was dear to no one, in whom no
one was the least interested, not even the naturalist who cannot
resist sticking a pin in a common fly and examining it under the
microscope; a being who endured the mockery of his colleagues
without protesting, who went to his grave without any undue fuss,
but to whom, nonetheless (although not until his last days) a shin–
ing visitor in the form of an overcoat suddenly appeared, brighten–
ing his wretched life for one fleeting moment; a being upon whose
head disaster had cruelly fallen, just as it falls upon the kings and
great ones of this earth .
But this is a choral statement. Like the often bland observations of the
choruses in Sophoclean tragedy, it gives the audience a possible view of
the play's events and shows us what the ordinary and perhaps rather
obtuse citizen might think. In some ways Gogol's paragraph fits the
action; in other ways it conspicuously fails to do so.
If
we ignore the
phrase "without protesting," it fits nicely with the hero Akaky's cry to
his fellow workers near the beginning of the story: "Leave me alone, why
do you have to torment me?" But this cry gets most of its power through
its contrast with the comic exaggeration and absurdity that surrounds it.
Akaky Akakievitch's very name-it might have been translated "Shit,
son of Shit," or perhaps (to get the baby-talk flavor of the Russian)
"Doo-doo, son of Doo-doo"-and numerous other details establish him
