The Overcoat

Akaky Akakievich loves the alphabet. A copying clerk in a St. Petersburg department too dull to name, he has no ambition beyond a clean transcription, certain letters his favourites, and the work brings him a private rapture that needs nothing else. Then a tailor tells him his coat is past mending, and the saving begins: months without supper, without candlelight, the future narrowed to one garment he can almost feel on his shoulders. When the coat finally comes it is the happiest day of his life, and Gogol's narrator, who has been mocking this little man for pages, suddenly cannot keep it up. There is a moment when a young clerk's joke falters and he hears, underneath it, I am your brother. That is the whole revolution of the story. The coat is stolen, the city that never noticed Akaky shrugs, and out of his death something walks back through the snow to collect what it is owed. Russian literature's tenderness for the overlooked begins here, improbably, in laughter.