Work in Progress

Dostoevsky famously said all Russian literature somehow stepped out of Gogol’s overcoat—out of “The Overcoat”—Gogol’s best-known tale, his greatest, often regarded as the greatest Russian short story, the basis of the nation’s literary tradition, of its artistry and social morality. “The Overcoat” is my personal favorite, the first Gogol I ever read, the last addition to his Petersburg Tales, worked over intermittently between 1839-1841, eventually published in 1842 in volume three of his collected works.

The story had a long incubation period. Gogol apparently first heard an anecdote years earlier, told among his friends, of a lowly government clerk with a passion for hunting. Though hard-up, he managed to scrimp and save enough money for a new rifle. On his maiden expedition, out hunting ducks, the clerk dozes off in a small boat and drops his gleaming new rifle in the lake, a watery farewell. Heartbroken, he falls into a deep depression, until his friends and work mates club together to buy him another gun. All Gogol’s friends, greatly amused, laughed heartily; yet Gogol, head bent, listening intently, remained silent; clearly the anecdote left a big impression on him, perhaps already processing it in his head, perhaps already utilizing it as creative raw material.

The wind howls in “The Overcoat,” the northern frost bites, the mortal enemy of poor civil service clerks. “Between eight and nine in the morning,” says Gogol, “just when the streets are crowded with civil servants on their way to the office, it starts dealing out indiscriminately such sharp nips to noses of every description that the poor clerks just do not know where to put them…the humbler titular counselors are sometimes quite defenseless. Their only salvation lies in running the length of five or six streets in their thin, wretched little overcoats and then having a really good stamp in the lobby until their facilities and capacity for office work have thawed out.”

“The Overcoat” makes you feel that northern chill, clawing at your exposed flesh; you hear it whistle its vicious onslaught. And yet, amazingly, Gogol’s rendering of deep Russian winter was penned in via Sistina, with its top floor apartment window open to Roman sunshine and warmth. It’s a testimony to Gogol’s creative imagination: “contained in my very nature,” he said, “is the ability to imagine a world graphically only when I have moved far away from it. That is why I can write about Russia only in Rome…in front of an open window fanned by salubrious air.”

From:  Gogol in Rome (and in Other Spaces)