A copying clerk in St. Petersburg saves kopeck by kopeck for a new overcoat, and when he finally wears it through the frozen streets he is, for one evening, a man transformed. Nikolai Gogol published this story in 1842, and from its slender frame Russian literature drew an entire tradition. Akaky Akakievich is ridiculous, obsessive, barely a person in the eyes of his colleagues, and yet Gogol renders his small passion with a tenderness that makes the reader complicit in every cruelty the world visits upon him. The coat is stolen. The authorities are indifferent. Akaky dies. Then his ghost walks Petersburg, stripping coats from the shoulders of the powerful, and the story that began as farce ends as something between prophecy and prayer.