The famous Dostoevsky line about Gogol's Overcoat was never Dostoevsky's
A French critic, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, is the source of the remark that Russian realists all emerged from beneath Gogol's Overcoat, though it is routinely credited to Dostoevsky. The 1843 story it praises follows a meek St. Petersburg copying clerk whose whole life narrows to the purchase of a new coat.
Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is about fifty, red-haired and balding, and he copies documents without error and without ambition. Asked once to make a small change rather than simply transcribe, he cannot manage it. Younger colleagues mock him and his threadbare coat, until the tailor Petrovich, a one-eyed former serf with a drinking habit, refuses to patch it any further. Akaky starves his budget, a surprise holiday bonus fills the gap, and the pair choose cat fur for the collar because marten costs too much.
The new coat makes him briefly visible. His office throws a party in its honour, he walks home unusually late, and two thieves strip it from him and leave him in the snow. The police are useless, and an important personage, a newly promoted general who shouts to prove his rank, berates him so fiercely that he nearly faints. Akaky dies of a fever, cursing the general in his delirium. His ghost then prowls the city stealing coats, until it snatches the general's own and vanishes.
Gogol loads the names with meaning. Akaky comes from a Greek word for harmless, and Bashmachkin derives from bashmak, a kind of shoe, echoing a Russian idiom for being under someone's thumb. The narration is told in skaz, a colloquial voice drawn from oral storytelling, and critics single out a passage where the comedy abruptly turns tragic: a new clerk hears Akaky plead to be left alone and is haunted for years by how much cruelty ordinary decent people carry.
Readers have pulled the story in many directions. A Marxist reading sees the coat giving Akaky his humanity; a psychoanalytic one notes that he treats it almost like a spouse. The scholar Harold McFarlin points out that Akaky, so low in the hierarchy, still treats his landlady as coldly as his bosses treat him. Vladimir Nabokov, writing in 1941, ranked it the greatest short story Russia had produced.
Source: The Overcoat
