Editor’s note
Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is widely considered one of the most important short stories in the history of the genre. It is a tale of a lowly clerk, Akakey Akakievich Bashmachkin, whose income and ambitions are so modest he does little else besides report to work, where he copies documents all day. Then he returns home to his rented room, where he dines on cabbage soup and continues copying documents brought home from work. The gap between Akaky Akakievich’s income and cost of living is so narrow that he never buys new clothes. When, inevitably, his old overcoat starts unraveling, saving for a new one becomes the very plot of the story, a protracted endeavor with many seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Of course, because this is a Russian short story, Akaky’s new overcoat is stolen from him the very day he procures it. And then he dies of exposure to the cold. Frank O’Connor’s book-length study of the short story form, The Lonely Voice, begins with a consideration of “The Overcoat,” which offers us perhaps the first example of what O’Connor calls “the Little Man.” While the novel is the territory of the hero, the short story, to O’Connor’s mind, is the territory of the Little Man, whose defining characteristic is that he is overlooked and unsung. For O’Connor, the story’s key moment comes when Akaky Akakievich is being teased by his coworkers for the shabbiness of his overcoat, an office ritual Akaky tolerates reasonably well, except on certain occasions: