‘The Overcoat’ by Nikolai Gogol translated by Ronald Wilks

A writer once told me that most people believed the ‘The Overcoat’ was about nothing. Really? A story about poverty, of our dreams of escaping our economic situations, and the sad but somehow comforting ending? How could someone be so arrogant, and certain, to sweep away ‘The Overcoat’? I’ve never spoken to that writer since.

Another Gogol anecdote. During the summers that I was a student I worked for the city of Toronto cleaning subway cars. The job was eight hours a day but there was really only work for four hours. The rest of the time I spent reading. One day this co-worker who I’d never met before, saw me reading a collection of Gogol short stories and said, “Gogol. A great Ukrainian writer.”
“Isn’t he Russian?” I asked.
“He was born in Ukraine.” He got up close to my face. “What’s your last name?”
“Popowich.”
“Popowich. A pure Ukraine name. Not Popovich? Popowich?”
“Right. Popowich.”

For the rest of the summer he would come by every day to see me and tell me about my last name. About Gogol. About Ukraine. Like many Canadians whose families came from elsewhere, our Ukrainian roots were forgotten by the time I was born. Except, of course, what our last names spoke of our pasts. I’ve thought about that man often since late 2021, his passion for Gogol, and especially his Ukrainian pride.

First published in Russian in 1842. First translated, as ‘The Cloak’, by Isabel Hapgood in St. John’s Eve, and Other Stories, Crowell, 1886. This translation available in Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector & Selected Stories, Penguin Classics, 2005

‘The Coat’ by Carys Davies and ’The Overcoat’ by Nikolai Gogol

Jorge Luis Borges says that short stories can be the perfect form for novelists too lazy to write anything longer than fifteen pages.

It is rare for a Davies story to last that long: ‘The Coat” clocks in at eight and-a-half. Her recent novel, West,musters only 149. Mistress of the art of concision, her stories are also, like Wodehouse’s, precisely engineered, their final lines slotting into place in ways that both surprise and satisfy.

Evangelina Hine keeps her handsome blacksmith husband Joseph’s coat hanging by the door he walked out of a year ago because she can’t – or won’t – see him as “a man who was doing his best to disappear”. The narrator, Margaret, sent to comfort her, and perhaps make her see sense, finds herself feeling more than pity. When Joseph unexpectedly returns, it is not as a ghost, but as a woman; a story about pity for an abandoned wife suddenly becomes one about the self-pity of the still-married Margaret.

A lazy writer could get away with giving us far less plot: it takes real effort to craft so much in so small a space. But not everything is about concision. Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ runs to twice Borges’ outer limit. It plunges us straight into a rambling, chatty voice:

And so, in a certain department there served a certain clerk; a not very remarkable clerk, one might say – short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as haemorrhoidal … No help for it! the Petersburg climate is to blame.”

In short, it looks like we’re in a tale (notably, the Granta edition is The Collected Tales– not stories), an anecdote that will follow the rambling byways of the teller’s mind; in reality, this first paragraph is as self-aware as Ali Smith’s, its descriptions as pitch-perfect as Wodehouse’s.

Half a dozen pages in, our not very remarkable clerk, Akaky Akakievich, visits the tailor Petrovich to get his old coat repaired. (“Of this tailor, of course, not much should be said, but since there exists a rule that the character of every person in a story be well delineated, let us have Petrovich here as well.”) Repair is impossible: Akaky Akakievich must buy a new coat he cannot afford; after months of scrimping – and dreaming of his new coat – he finally manages to buy it, only to be robbed at once. By now we’re twenty pages in, and we know the only question is just how much worse things will get for poor Akaky Akakievich.

And on we go, through a rollicking, devastating, genuinely affecting satire that makes one wonder whether Borges might not have got things back-to-front. Perhaps the novel is the perfect form for writers too lazy for short stories.

‘The Coat’, in The Redemption of Galen Pike, Salt, 2014. ‘The Overcoat’, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. By Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Granta Books, 2003, and available online, including here

‘Nevsky Prospekt’ by Nikolay Gogol, trans. Ronald Wilks

Gogol was in some ways the most 19th-century-Russian-novelist of the 19th-century Russian novelists. He has some of the louche wit and sophistication of Lermontov; some of the brisk amorality of Leskov; a little of Dostoevsky’s intensity (but, thank goodness, far less of his frantic earnestness); in private he shared with Tolstoy a religious agony. He was a visionary with a cocked eyebrow. ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ is a darkly entranced waltz through St Petersburg, city of clerks and civil servants, an improbable dream-city (but one later spun into yet more oblique fantasy by Andrei Bely). Gogol shows us the cracked passion and miserable suicide of the artist Piskarev, and the thwarted philandering of the officer Pirogov – but most of all he shows us the city (no, his city) with wide-panning camerawork that at times recalls Dickens’ cinematic swoops through London in Bleak House. “Everything here breathes deception,” the narrator warns. With ‘The Nose’ and ‘The Overcoat’, ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ completes a metropolitan trilogy that presents St Petersburg in treacherously shifting light: at once a city of the dead and a theatre of the absurd.

First published in 1835. Collected in The Diary Of A Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories, Penguin, 2005