MOORE
473
It
is useful for a great writer to be aware of things like the importance
of stereoscopic vision for judging depth in close work. We have almost
forgotten that Petrovitch only has one eye when we are reminded of the
fact, hearing him trying to thread a needle: "Why won't you go through,
you swine! You'll be the death of me, you devil!" That last word keeps
cropping up in connection with Petrovitch. Akaky had hoped
to
find
him agreeably drunk, "as his wife put it, 'after he'd bin swigging that
corn brandy again, the old one-eyed devil! '" -but instead finds him
"sober...and in the right mood for charging the devil's own price."
After the creation of Eve comes the Temptation proper. Akaky is
invited to a party, signifying his entrance into the unreal world of Peters–
burg, from which his simplicity, poverty, and devotion
to
copying had
excluded-perhaps we should say, exempted-him. As Gogol had said
earlier:
No one could remember ever having seen him at a party. After he
had copied
to
his heart's content he would go to bed, smiling in
anticipation of the next day and what God would send him to copy.
But now all this has changed, and Akaky reflects that going to "the
party would give him the opportunity of going out in his new overcoat
that very same evening." Not just the comforts of the overcoat, pride
and vanity about having them have made their entrance as well.
The retribution for this lapse from the heavenly state is swift and sure.
It
is the presence of the myth of the Fall which makes the sudden theft of
the overcoat seem so right, so inevitable.
It
is right, too-esthetically
right-that it happens in the vast and deserted square, which seems
to
stand for the emptiness of Petersburg and its parties.
And if the overcoat thief is the Angel of God, then somehow the Very
Important Person, whose foolish arrogance finally destroys Akaky com–
pletely, is a kind of mocking Petersburg representation of God Himself,
who, in the end, like the Old Testament's God of Wrath, repents His
sternness with Man.
Above all, there is Akaky-who is below all. There is this strange,
new, deeply disturbing phenomenon of nature that Gogol has discov–
ered: this anti-hero, this housefly that stands for man and his tragic des–
tiny. He is a uniquely Russian discovery, and it was in Russia that he
first ,proliferated-in Dostoyevsky's idiot-saint Myshkin and whore–
saint Sonya, Tolstoy'S Pierre and Platon Karataev, and Chekhov's Dar–
ling and Lipa Tzybukin. Out of the folds of "The Overcoat" they came
indeed. Gogol's Eve has been the mother of many.
