“The Overcoat”

I came to this story quite circuitously. This spring, or possibly last fall, I read a novel called The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. It is about an Indian-American man named Gogol, after Nikolai Gogol, a Russian author whom the character’s father, Ashoke, read and loved. Ashoke tells Gogol-the-character solemnly, “We have all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat.” Intrigued by this quote and the significance of the author to these characters, I hunted up a Dover Thrift Edition of The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (1842) in order to investigate for myself.

* Disclaimer: I detest every piece of Russian literature I have ever read. *

Since “The Overcoat” was what attracted me to this author, that is the story I read first. Sadly, and as I expected, I will not be reading any more Nikolai Gogol. Like that of every other Russian author whom I have had the misfortune to encounter (Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski), I found the style to be formal, pompous, and digressive; the storyline indirect, obscure, and needlessly tragic, and the characters eliciting little emotion save contempt.

The story goes thus: Akakii Akakievich, a poor and pitiful copier for the government, needs a new overcoat because his old one is so threadbare. After making arrangements with his tailor, he goes hungry for many months in order to afford the new garment. On the day of its completion, his colleagues decide impulsively to throw him a party, but on the way home his overcoat is stolen. In mourning, Akakii Akakeivich applies to many bureaucratic official personages to help him get his overcoat back, but when one of them at last chases him from the building, he catches a cold in the Petersburg winter and dies. He is said to haunt the area stealing others’ coats, and supposedly steals the overcoat of the official responsible for his death; but readers feel little triumph at this unsatisfactory victory.

And I still fail to understand Ashoke’s solemn pronouncement to his son Gogol in The Namesake. If we all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat, do we kill ourselves for our possessions? Do we fail to be decisive in acquiring help from others? Do we haunt those we leave behind? Or was the character Ashoke referring exclusively to his near-death experience on the train?

But the mystery, I fear, will remain as unsolved as the “Other Short Stories” will remain unread.