literature

  

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****1. at least five of his/her own substantial literary critical comments based on the discussed stories. Each comment should be min. one paragraph – max. two paragraphs long; and*****

“The Overcoat” is one of the key works of Russian 19-th century literature, and one of the most known works by Nikolai Gogol.

This story has had a tremendous influence on the development of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and many other 19th- and 20th-century writers. 

Why is this story, written in the mid-19th century Russia, is still read and resonates today with a contemporary reader?

What features of the human personality does Gogol describe which are crucial for all to discuss? Why?

How do you understand the character of Akakii Akaievich? What kind of life does he have? 

What is there so important about Akakii’s “brotherly love” to his colleagues and to other people?

Are there such people like Akakii in our society? If yes, would they be considered as normal or as less normal, as outsiders?

Is Akakii a victim of the society, a villain, or some other type? Please explain.

NikolaiVasil’evich Gogol (1809-1852)

“The Overcoat”

Gogol’s Literary Input

The contemporary Russian literature considers Gogol its teacher. In his writings a

spearing power of laughter is connected with tragic upheavals. Gogol was able to find a common

root for the comic and the tragic. Yet despite of his notable destiny in literature and art, the

endless publication of his works in Russia and abroad, and successful screen adaptations of his

stories, Gogol is not easy to read.

Even for his own contemporaries Gogol was the person who constantly surprised them

with all kinds of mysteries surrounding his persona and with his creativity. Cheerful and gloomy,

outgoing and secretive, sad and arrogant in his moralizing, Gogol turned out to be impossible to

comprehend. Even his appearance seemed quite different to his contemporaries. This is how one

of his contemporaries, the writer Aksakov, describes him: “cleanly shaved dandy in a

fashionable jacket,” “kindness and love to everybody is sparkling in his eyes,” “long blond hair,”

“serious and striving to the elevated,” he was making “original and funny jokes which provoked

an uncontrollable laughter.” And here is what another writer, Danilevsky, tells about Gogol,

“Brown long hair,” “small gentle eyes looked kindly but carefully.” But the most exact portrait

of Gogol belongs to the artist, Ivanov, who lived close to Gogol in Rome, “In the real life, he is

all virtuous and sober. He hates pettiness and sincerely fights with it;” “spiritually

beautiful…The thoughts about Russia are the vital part of his existence.”

Gogol’s childhood of a sun of a small Ukrainian landowner was spent peacefully in the

family estate of Vasil’evka, near the city of Poltava (Ukraine, which is now an independent

country, in the 19th century was a part of the Russian Empire). Everything was slow here like

nature itself. A complete freedom: the boy did not have strict governors and teachers and before

entering the school, he was taught by a student of a religious seminary, who had no restrictions

for the boy whatsoever. Their neighbor, a rich landowner, had his own theatre in which serfs

were performing and Gogol’s father wrote plays for this theatre. Sometimes Nikolai with his

parents performed in it.

Gogol continued his studies in the city gymnasia (boarding school) of Nezhin; the

education he had received was thorough and deep. At school, a future writer was characterized as

the one who was capable of noticing the most prominent features of his friend and teachers and

of writing humoristic characteristics on them. He also continued playing in the school theatre.

But before reaching the heights in literature, Gogol had to go through numerous misfortunes. The

year of the Decembrists uprising, 1825, during which his father passed away and Russia’s tsarist

regime was shaken for the first time, made Gogol grow up quickly. Now he had to think about

how to take care of his family and his sisters and how to build his personal career.

His dreams of accomplishing something extraordinary, outstanding, and sincere led him

from his native town to Russia’s beautiful capital which did not have anything in common with a

sleepy provincial Nezhin. But after a warm and charming little town, St. Petersburg met Gogol

coldly and indifferently and turned to be quite different from the city Gogol once portrayed in his

dreams. The young provincial decides to apply for a job in the judicial sphere in order to fight

evil but could not get a position he wanted, and his financial resources started coming to an end.

He began living like in a desert and even had to refuse visiting theatre. He also tried to enter one

of the Emperor’s theatres as an actor because he had an extraordinary talent of a comic actor and

a previous experience. But during the exam he was disliked by the head of the exam commission

and refused the job. This was one of the heaviest blows for Gogol.

Having exhausted all the opportunities, Gogol started working as a clerk which gave him

a reach material for his future story, “The Overcoat.” Senseless, tedious, and endless paperwork,

egoistic and merciless treatment from other officials, total indifference and corruption – these

were the most characteristic features of the bureaucratic system encountered by Gogol. Again,

the reality was very far from the dreams of a young man from a small town. But the desire to

make a difference did not leave Gogol as he tried his talent in literature. In 1830 in the journal

“The Notes of the Fatherland” Gogol’s first novella from the future, “The Evenings near the

Village of Dikanka,” appears. A small recognition allows Gogol to leave his official post. At this

time he gets acquainted with Pushkin and Zhukovsky.

The appearance in print of the entire collection in 1831-1832 brings a huge success.

The new hopes appear: Gogol starts visiting fashionable salons and meeting with the

“cream of society.” His friendship with Pushkin and Zhukovsky is growing and their influence

on Gogol becomes more and more prominent. Pushkin was thrilled to read Gogol’s first

collection and highly praised it especially for to its folklore spirit, masterful descriptions of

nature and people, author’s reach fantasy, and brilliance of its language. It was Pushkin who

blessed Gogol for literary work and who gave him the plots for the future famous satirical play,

“The Inspector General,” and for his major novel, Dead Souls. In 1835, Gogol’s two new

collections of short stories saw the light, “Mirgorod” and “Arabesks.” The last one was later

completed with new works, including “The Overcoat,” and was published under the title,

“Petersburg Tales,” which was the beginning of Gogol’s realistic writing. A gloomy portrayal of

the city which kills all living as in the center of this collection.

After the collapse of the stage premiere of “The Inspector General” which was disliked

by the Tsar, Nicholas I, who suspected it to be a social satire, Gogol was devastated. All his

hopes seemed to be ruined and he left Russia for a lengthy travel in Europe. In Europe, he

conceived the idea of writing Dead Souls as a hymn of love to his motherland. He settled down

in Rome because this city was inspiring him on creation of a work similar to Dante’s Divine

Comedy. Gogol spent all of his creative energy on writing this magnificent work but instead of

becoming a success, this novel (or, poèma, as Gogol himself called it) became the greatest

tragedy in his life. He could never complete it and the tsarist censorship did not allow it’s

publication in full. The novel’s first volume was taken as a satire on the regime and not as a

glorifying hymn, despite its numerous beautifully written passages on Russia’s destiny and

nature. Gogol attempted to write the second volume which by its artistic qualities was far more

inferior to the first one. In his attempt to beautify the regime and re-make the old protagonists,

Gogol failed as he was unable to lie. In 1845, he burned the second volume, and then re-wrote it

again…and then burned it for the second time! He could not lie to himself.

In his search for spiritual calm, Gogol turned to religion. He wrote a new book called The

Selected Passages from the Correspondence with the Friends (1847). It testified to Gogol’s

attempt to make peace with life as it was. In doing so he was often falling into the extremes and

even praised serfdom. At the same time, his work also included numerous striking pages with

wisdom and powerful thoughts. Yet, this book did not facilitate the progress in the country:

during 1840s Russia was on its way to struggle for the abolishing the serfdom while Gogol was

calling for the refusal of such a struggle and for turning back. By many progressive writers

Gogol’s book was regarded as monarchist utopia.

Gogol exhausted his physical and spiritual strengths trying to justify the way of life

against which he initially fought in “The Inspector General” and in the first volume of Dead

Souls. In the spring of 1852, he died in Moscow, in the house of his friends located in

Suvorovsky Bulevard. In the yard of this house, a famous monument to Gogol still stands.

“The Overcoat”

The genre of “The Overcoat” is called in Russian povest’ – a literary work that is longer

than a short story but shorter than a novel, and is usually translated as “tale.” It is based on a real

story: one day Gogol heard a joke about a poor clerical worker who was a passionate game

hunter and who was able to accumulate a certain sum of money through his hard work and

painstaking everyday savings. These two hundred roubles were saved to buy a hunting gun.

During his first hunt in the Gulf of Finland (a part of the Baltic Sea located in a close proximity

of St. Petersburg) with the new gun he had bought, he felt almost delirious – so excited he was.

He took a boat, put his gun on the bow, and set off for his trip. But when he looked at it again,

his gun already was missing. Perhaps, it was swept away by the thick reed when the boat was

making its way through the gulf fiords, and all his efforts to find the gun were ended in vain. The

poor man returned home, lied down in his bed, and fell ill. And it was only due to a common

effort of his friends that he was returned to life: they collected the money and bought him a new

gun. Afterwards, he could not speak either about his gun or about what has happened to him

without a deathly paleness on his face.

Everybody was laughing at this joke but Gogol, who after hearing it, has bowed his head

and started thinking about something else. This joke gave him an idea to write “The Overcoat,”

and he started his povest’ in that very evening.

Gogol was a strange creature but geniuses are always strange as great literature is always

balancing on the edge of rational and irrational. “The Overcoat” depicts both a grotesque truth

and a dull surrealistic nightmare which Akaky’s life was about. The attentive reader will see that

Gogol’s tasks were to expose and to criticize the darkest sides of the tsarist bureaucratic regime

and what exactly it was doing to its average citizens, like Akaky. Those who read “The

Overcoat” for fun and entertainment only will perceive it as the description of strange grimaces

of not a entirely normal clown. But for both types of readers, it would be not easy to understand

what exactly “The Overcoat” was all about. Only a reader with a creative thinking will be able to

understand that this story was created just for him – so much irrational is involved in it that it

does not fully fit into the frames of a conventional realistic or fantastic story.

In Gogol’s art such shifts are very common, moreover, they make up the basis of his art.

And that is why when in “The Overcoat” he exposed his talent to its fullest extend based on his

personal tragic experience he was able to become one of greatest writers ever appeared in Russia.

Akaky is absurd and tragic simultaneously; he is a victim of the society into which he was born

and is in antagonism with this society because he is humane and this society is not. This sharpest

contrast makes an underlining of the entire tale.

“The Overcoat” presents the first in the 19th-century Russian literature detailed portrayal

of a small, insignificant man. The predecessors of Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich were Pushkin’s

Yevgeny from “The Bronze Horseman” and also his station master from the tale with the same

title. (This was the second literary type to appear in the first half of the 19th century: the

representative of the first type, “a superfluous man,” was Lermontov’s Pechorin.) Gogol went

father than his beloved friend Pushkin: he developed this character into a distinctive literary type,

by stressing his social characteristics, relating his misfortunes to his social position, and,

generally, portraying him in a realistic way. With the character of Akaky, a whole new galaxy of

similar personages appeared in the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevky, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin

and other Russian and European writers. Dostoevsky was known for his famous phrase, “We

have all come out from under Gogol’s overcoat” with which he stressed Gogol’s enormous

influence on and his importance for the world’s literature.