‘The Overcoat’: A Parable of Human Frailty

A review of ‘The Overcoat’, by Nikolai Gogol; 1842.

All Russian writers ‘came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat’, as the French diplomat Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé put it in his The Russian Novel. Published in 1842, the story has had a massive influence on Russian literature, dealing as it does in a humorous, absurdist way the basic human need for warmth, dignity and recognition in a grim, indifferent world. In writing The Overcoat, Gogol ‘really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss’, as Nabokov would put it, adding that it was ‘the greatest Russian short story ever written.’

The story follows Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a downtrodden clerk in Tsarist Russia. His life is decidedly grey, consisting chiefly of the copying of documents—a job he nonetheless approaches with reverence and care. His younger colleagues, mock him, tease him, and attempt to distract him. His threadbare overcoat is often the subject of their jokes. One day, Akaky goes to a tailor and asks if he can have it repaired. The tailor, Petrovich, declares it irreparable. Akaky must purchase a new one.

The story follows Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a downtrodden clerk in Tsarist Russia.

But a new coat is well beyond his means. Akaky must make a budget, and keep to it unfailingly. He throws himself into this task, and frequently he meets Petrovich to discuss the new coat’s style. Soon his zeal for his work is replaced by thoughts of the coat, to the extent that he thinks of little else. Finally, after many months of saving and with the help of a large surprise bonus, Akaky can buy the new coat. And the thing is magnificent: for once, Akaky feels seen, and the world no longer seems so cold and indifferent. But of course, the story does not end there.

The Overcoat is a study of human frailty. Gogol tries to show us how fragile our dignity is when it is tied to symbols of material success and the fleeting validation of our peers. Akaky’s coat is not just a garment, but his ticket to social acceptance, as it were: his claim to humanity. It is impossible to divorce this idea of membership and acceptance from the bureaucracy of which he is a part, and this is the other target of Gogol’s ire: the complicated machine of administration, with its arbitrary hierarchy, which turns men like Akaky into faceless cogs. Like Kafka’s The Trial, The Overcoat explores the oppression intrinsic to any incomprehensible bureaucracy, the petty tyranny of systems rooted less than in reason than in randomness.

It is impossible to divorce this idea of membership and acceptance from the bureaucracy of which he is a part.

And then there is St. Petersburg itself, which Gogol depicts not just as a setting but an active force in the lives of its residents. When he came from to St. Petersburg from Ukraine, where he was born, Gogol found the city tough to understand. He imagined it to be ‘more beautiful, more magnificent’, and struggles to see how its people could be so different from the rowdy, colourful Cossacks he knew in his youth. Petersburg, seen as Russia’s window to the West and a symbol of modernisation, is portrayed here by Gogol as a soulless, bureaucratic city that stomps on individuals, and turns its worst inhabitants into reflections of itself: icy, grim, harsh.

Akaky is one of those who has been chewed up and spat out by Petersburg, by bureaucracy, and by the shallow, status-conscious culture that predominates. The shattering of his character is so complete that he is hard to take seriously at first. He is so meek as to seem less than human, almost inviting contempt. Yet Akaky’s yearning for recognition and acceptance from his peers is a human universal, and his hope of one day accomplishing that goal is the hope that motivates so many people, one way or another, as we go about our lives. It speaks to the common human experience, to human nature.