Gogol’s Overcoat: The Story All Russian Fiction Came Out Of

‘We all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat.’ The line is attributed to Dostoevsky, and whether he said it or not, it is true. Modern Russian literature — its compassion for the humiliated, its strange collision of the comic and the desperate — begins with Nikolai Gogol, and above all with one short story about a poor clerk and his coat.

Akaky Akakievich is a nobody, a copying clerk mocked by everyone, whose entire life narrows to a single dream: a new overcoat to replace his threadbare one. He scrimps and starves for it; he finally has it; it is glorious; and then it is stolen, and the indifference of the authorities kills him. It is absurd and unbearable at once — Gogol makes you laugh at Akaky and then breaks your heart with him, and in that double vision the whole Russian novel is born.

Gogol is the strangest of the great Russians — a comic genius haunted by demons, who could conjure a whole corrupt province in The Government Inspector, or send a con man across Russia buying up dead serfs in Dead Souls, and make it all shimmer between farce and nightmare. No one else sounds like him.

This edition gathers the complete Dead Souls with Taras Bulba, the plays, and the Petersburg tales — including The Overcoat. Read it, then read the Dostoevsky it made possible.

Read Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls and the Petersburg Tales →