Nikolai Gogol published "The Overcoat" in 1842 as part of a collection titled Arabesques. Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is a low-ranking copying clerk in a St. Petersburg government office, a man so thoroughly defined by his function that he has no existence outside it. When the St. Petersburg winter forces him to have his ancient overcoat replaced, the months of saving and deprivation required to afford the new coat give his life an intensity it otherwise lacks. The coat is stolen the night he first wears it. His attempts to report the theft to the appropriate authorities fail entirely, and he dies of a fever shortly after. His ghost subsequently haunts the city, stealing coats from passersby, until it steals the overcoat of the Important Person who failed to help him.
The story is simultaneously a realist account of bureaucratic humiliation and a supernatural tale, and it does not explain which frame governs. The statement, attributed in various forms to Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and others, "We all came out of Gogol's Overcoat", identifies the story as the origin point of the tradition of sympathetic treatment of the Petersburg little man that defines much of Russian realist fiction. What Gogol provides, that later writers either extend or react against, is the combination of comedy and pathos: Akaky is ridiculous, his suffering is real, and the social structure that produces him is indicted through the depiction without being directly attacked.
"The Overcoat" is one of the most formally analyzed stories in Russian literature, and for good reason: the narrative manages multiple tonal registers simultaneously, the comic inventory of Akaky's habits, the bureaucratic satire of the police captain scene, the Gothic ghost finale, without any single register canceling the others. Reading the story slowly and attentively reveals decisions about what to show and what to withhold, about how to render institutional dehumanization through its effect on a single specific person, that have continued to influence Russian and Soviet fiction throughout the following century.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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