Reading Order
The Overcoat Reading Order
The Overcoat (Shinel, 1842) by Nikolai Gogol is one of the most important short stories in world literature — the story of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a minor copying clerk in the St. Petersburg bureaucracy who scrimp and saves for months to buy a new overcoat, has it stolen on the first night he wears it, dies of despair when the authorities refuse to help him recover it, and returns as a ghost to steal overcoats from passers-by. Dostoevsky famously said that all Russian literature came out from under Gogol's Overcoat, and the story is the founding text of Russian literary tradition in a double sense: it established the 'little man' (malen'kiy chelovek) as the central figure of Russian fiction, and it established the fantastical-grotesque tone that runs through Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Platonov, and beyond. The Overcoat is also technically extraordinary: Gogol's narrator is unreliable, digressive, and apparently stupid, managing to say things of devastating clarity while appearing to be describing nothing in particular. The famous opening — 'In the department of... but it is better not to mention in what department' — sets up a narrative of systematic evasion that paradoxically reveals more than a direct account would. The story's sudden shift from social satire to the supernatural (Akaky returns as a ghost) is treated with the same flat, bureaucratic matter-of-factness as the story's realistic sections, creating an effect that influenced Kafka's transformations, Bulgakov's devil in Moscow, and virtually every subsequent Russian writer who wanted to move between the realistic and the fantastical. Gogol's complete works — including the story collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, the play The Government Inspector, and the novel Dead Souls — are all essential reading for anyone drawn into the Overcoat's world.
Where to start
The Overcoat — any complete translation; Leonard Kent's in the Signet Classics volume is excellent; Pevear and Volokhonsky's collection The Collected Tales of Gogol contains the best recent translations. Read it with Nevsky Prospect and The Nose in the same sitting.
Complete The Overcoat Book List
- 1Buy
The Collected Tales (trans. Pevear/Volokhonsky)
Nikolai Gogol·1998·The best modern translations of Gogol's stories — The Overcoat, The Nose, Nevsky Prospect, and the other essential Petersburg tales. - 2Buy
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol·1842·Gogol's satirical novel — the full development of his vision of Russian provincial society; the most ambitious work by Gogol and the one that influenced Dostoevsky most directly. - 3Buy
The Government Inspector
Nikolai Gogol·1836·Gogol's comic masterpiece for the stage — the satire of Russian provincial officialdom that anticipated The Overcoat; the most accessible entry to Gogol's world. - 4Buy
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov·1967·Bulgakov's Soviet fantastical novel — the twentieth-century heir of Gogol's grotesque-fantastical mode; Woland is a descendant of Gogol's supernatural intrusions. - 5Buy
Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky·1864·Dostoevsky's first great novel — the underground man is the 'little man' of Gogol's tradition transformed into a philosophical anti-hero; the most important response to The Overcoat. - 6Buy
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka·1915·Kafka's transformation story — the most famous descendant of Gogol's method; the bureaucratic grotesque taken to its logical extreme; the thing that happens to Gregor Samsa is what the bureaucracy did to Akaky Akakievich. - 7Buy
Petersburg
Andrei Bely·1913·Bely's Russian modernist novel — the other great St. Petersburg novel; Gogol's city transformed into a symbolist labyrinth of bureaucracy, revolution, and hallucination. - 8Buy
The Nose and Other Stories
Nikolai Gogol·1836·Gogol's other essential story — a civil servant's nose achieves independent existence and outranks its owner; the best single illustration of Gogol's absurdist method alongside The Overcoat.
The Overcoat — Frequently Asked Questions
What happens in The Overcoat?
Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is a low-ranking copying clerk in a St. Petersburg department whose old overcoat has become so threadbare that it cannot be repaired. The tailor Petrovich quotes an exorbitant price for a new coat; Akaky scrimp and saves for months, living on very little, doing extra copying work, until he has enough money. He buys the coat; on his first evening wearing it, he attends a party, drinks champagne (which he never does), and on the way home is robbed of the coat in a dark square. He goes to a 'certain important person' for help, who treats him with contemptuous cruelty; Akaky falls ill and dies of a fever caused by standing in the cold outside the important person's house. Shortly afterward, a ghost that matches Akaky's description begins stealing overcoats from passers-by near the square; the important person himself is one of the victims.
What is the 'little man' tradition in Russian literature and how did Gogol create it?
The 'little man' (malen'kiy chelovek) is the defining figure of nineteenth-century Russian realism — the low-ranking clerk, the insignificant bureaucrat, the person whose life is defined by his social powerlessness, who is crushed by the system without ever understanding why. Gogol's Akaky Akakievich is the founding figure of this tradition: he has no inner life (he copies by choice, even at home; he has no desire but to copy well); he is invisible to the social world around him (his colleagues torment him harmlessly, as if he were furniture); and his destruction by the bureaucracy when he seeks help is both predictable and devastating. Dostoevsky developed the little man into a psychological study (Raskolnikov, Prince Myshkin); Chekhov gave him a comedy of misrecognition; and the tradition runs through the entire Russian literary canon.
How does Gogol use the narrator in The Overcoat?
Gogol's narrator in The Overcoat is one of the strangest and most innovative in Russian literature — apparently stupid, digressive, and easily distracted, but actually capable of devastating insight when he is not looking directly at his subject. The story opens with the narrator apparently unable to even name the department he is describing; it proceeds through apparent irrelevancies (a long digression on the origin of Akaky's name) that turn out to be central to the story's emotional logic; and it shifts suddenly between documentary realism and fantastical supernatural without any change in tone. This narrative method — evasion as revelation, apparent stupidity as a kind of irony — influenced Dostoevsky's narrator in Notes from Underground, Chekhov's detached narrators, and the tradition of unreliable narration that runs through Russian modernism.
What does Dostoevsky mean when he says all Russian literature came out from under Gogol's Overcoat?
The remark (which Dostoevsky may or may not have actually said in this form) is usually taken to mean that the main concerns of Russian fiction — the 'little man,' the St. Petersburg environment, the relationship between the individual and the bureaucratic state, the social grotesque, the pathos of the powerless — derive from Gogol's work, and particularly from The Overcoat and Dead Souls. Russian literary history tends to support this reading: the tradition of sympathetic engagement with the suffering of insignificant people (Dostoevsky's Poor Folk is an explicit response to The Overcoat); the satirical treatment of bureaucracy; the mixture of the realistic and the fantastical; and the exploration of St. Petersburg as a place of alienation and social violence all flow directly from Gogol.
What should I read after The Overcoat?
After The Overcoat, the natural continuation is Gogol's other Petersburg tales — The Nose and Nevsky Prospect are essential — followed by Dead Souls and The Government Inspector. Dostoevsky's Poor Folk (1846), his first novel, is an explicit response to Gogol's little man tradition. For the tradition Gogol generated, Kafka's Metamorphosis (1915) is the most important non-Russian descendant; Bulgakov's Master and Margarita is the most important Russian one. Donald Fanger's Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (1965) is the best scholarly account of Gogol's influence on Russian literary history.
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