Akaky Akakievich, a poor copying clerk in St. Petersburg, saves for months to buy a new overcoat, is mugged the first night he wears it, and dies of grief. Gogol tells this story with apparent sympathy that flickers into mockery and back, never settling. The overcoat becomes the poor man's everything. The ghost that returns to haunt the city is both pathetic and terrifying. Dostoevsky supposedly said that all Russian literature came out of Gogol's Overcoat, and whether or not he said it, it's true. The story is funny and devastating and strange. It invented a kind of pity that includes cruelty.