The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)

The Overcoat is a beautifully told story that will not allow you to look at people the same way, especially those who might be ostracized. While Akaky is a figure from 19th century Russia, he is very much a character that can be found in the 21st century. Moreover, when Gogol tells about the druken tailor with his witchy wife and the smell of onions, the reader at once pictures the dreadful wench and the overpowering smell of fried onions. And when the commissioner berates Akaky, it is hard not to almost faint in fear, or be outraged. Gogol is a master of stirring the human emotions and mixing them with vivid descriptions making for stories that a reader cannot forget.

The Nose is a very funny story, much of which gets lost in translation and in time. But the idea of a vain official losing his nose only to have it turn up as a mid-level bureaucrat is still relevant in this world of middle management. What a tremendous story tale of human vanity and what a surreal tale that seemed to spawn the likes of Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog," and "Master and Margarita."


Makes most Russian literature seem absurdly solemn.   December 19, 2001
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The four stories in this collection contrast a precise realism - whether it is the evocation of place and atmosphere, or a description of civil service procedure - with narratives of absurdity, fantasy and pure comedy. If the classic 19th century novel, as epitomised by the likes of Tolstoy, mirrored a world-view that society, people or history could be known and adequately represented in fiction, than Gogol reveals the impossibility of applying that model to Russia - his is an unstable, constantly metamorphosing, fluctuating and seemingly random universe. Whereas the apparatus of order, such as bureaucracy or the justice system only weave chaos, or, at best, a parody of order; Gogol's primary device for destabilising the familiar world is narration. If the 19th century novel was related by a third-person, voice-of-God narrator, who knew everything about the generalities of empires and the most intimate thoughts of chambermaids, than Gogol's narrators dance constantly on the brink of madness, inopportunely professing ignorance, amnesia and prejudice, their prose styles febrile, staccato and grotesque.

The 'straightest' story in this collection is 'Old-Fashioned Farmers', a tragicomic story of old age, marriage and superstition, which, in its nostalgic and detailed evocation of a vanished period in Russian provinical life, looks ahead to Nabokov's ravishing memoir 'Speak Memory', albeit laced with a comic and satiric irony the later book lacks. The long 'How The Two Ivans Quarrelled' pinpoints the pettiness of the lower gentry's notions of pride and honour, as two lifelong friends become bitter enemies when one calls the other a 'goose'. This hilarious tale of small-town pretensions and inept local government includes the priceless scene of a fat brown sow breaking into the courthouse and stealing the petition of its owner's antagonist.

The famous 'Overcoat' is often considered one of the greatest stories ever written, and the way Gogol manages to avoid sentimentality in the story of an insignificant middle-aged clerk whose routine and despised life is briefly illumined by the purchase of a specially made new overcoat he can ill afford, and which is soon stolen, is admirable. The lunge into nightmare and the savage satire of the Russian civil service remain shocking. The standout story for me, though, is 'The Nose', which plays like Kafka rewritten by Mark Twain, in which a barber finds a nose in his breakfast, and its owner wakes up with a smooth face. With the most glorious deadpan comedy, Gogol describes the loss and the procedures to find it as if it were a wallet: at another point, the Nose is found disguised as a councillor attempting to flee the city by horse.

The translations ('The Nose' by Gleb Struve, an early translator of Nabokov, and his wife Mary; the others by Isabel F. Hapgood) are readable, retrieving Gogol's brisk comic pace and some of his incongruities of language. There is a use of cliches in Hapgood's 1886 transations, however, that can't always be credited to Gogol's deflating method, and which make certain passages feel flat.