472
PARTISAN REVIEW
life," the overcoat and Akaky's attachment to it ruin his state of blessed–
ness. Once it appears, copying is forgotten, blotted out by "real life."
"All these [thoughts about the overcoat] very nearly turned his mind.
Once he was not far from actually making a
copying mistake,
so that he
almost cried 'Ugh!' and crossed himself."
In
one interpretation of the Biblical story of the Fall of Man, Adam's
primal state of bliss was destroyed , not by his violation of God's com–
mandment, but by his longing for Eve and her creation. Gogol's fear of
women and apparent chastity are well known and are reflected else–
where in his fiction-in "Diary of a Madman" and in
Ivan Fyodor–
ovitch Shponka and His Aunt,
for example.
Then is that "shining visitor in the form of an overcoat" Adam
Akaky's Eve? Gogol's answer to that question is loud and clear:
He even trained himself to go without any food at all in the
evenings, for his nourishment was
spiritual,
his thoughts always
full of that overcoat which one day was
to
be his. From that time
onwards his whole life seemed to have become richer, as though he
had married and another human being was by his side.
It
was as if
he was not alone at all but had some pleasant companion who had
agreed
to
tread life's path together with him; and this companion
was none other than the overcoat with its thick cotton-wool
padding and strong lining, made
to
last a lifetime.
That "thick cotton-wool padding" is downright obscene. Nabokov
remarks that the overcoat is like a mistress, but that is too weak a term
for the life companion that Gogol specifies. Even before it exists, the
comforting new garment begins to change its possessor: "'A hundred
and fifty rubles for an overcoat!' poor Akaky shrieked for what was per–
haps the first time in his life-he was well known for his low voice."
But if Eve is the agent of Adam's destruction, it could not have been
God who created her; it must have been the Devil. This thought seems
to have inspired Gogol's description of Petrovitch, the one-eyed ruffian
and former serf who repairs "trousers and frock-coats whenever-it
goes without saying-he was sober and was not hatching some plot in
that head of his." Seeking him out, Akaky seems to be visiting the infer–
nal regions-climbing stairs "running with water and slops...saturated
with that strong smell of spirit which makes the eyes smart and is a per–
petual feature of all backstairs in Petersburg."
In
Petrovitch's flat itself,
"his wife had been frying some kind of fish and had made so much
smoke in the kitchen that not even the cockroaches were visible."
