The Overcoat

The Overcoat is a short story by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842. It follows Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a poor, timid copying clerk in the St. Petersburg civil service who is mocked by his colleagues and lives an existence of near-total insignificance, until the bitter cold forces him to save for months to afford a new overcoat, which briefly transforms how his colleagues treat him. On the very night he celebrates his purchase, the coat is stolen from him by street thieves, and his desperate attempts to get help from the police and from a self-important official known only as the Person of Consequence go nowhere; broken by the loss and by his humiliating treatment, Akaky falls ill and dies, after which his ghost is said to haunt the city, stealing overcoats from passersby until it finally takes the Person of Consequence's own coat and vanishes. Vladimir Nabokov called it the greatest Russian short story ever written, and the famous, though likely apocryphal, remark that we all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat has been used ever since to describe the story's enormous influence over the whole tradition of Russian realist fiction that followed it, particularly its sympathetic treatment of a powerless, humiliated everyman crushed by an indifferent bureaucracy.