The single most famous short story in the whole of Russian literature, "The Overcoat" is also the

most widely misunderstood. Russian critics of the nineteenth century enveloped it in a thick fog
of sentimentalization. It was credited with being the beginning of the philanthropic trend in
Russian literature and the first realistic depiction of poverty and the plight of ‘the little man’. The
celebrated and oft-quoted maxim “We all emerged from Gogol's overcoat” long incorrectly
attributed to Dostoyevsky and ultimately traced to the turn-of-the-century French critic Melchior
de Vogue, implied that Russian realism in its totality grew out of this one story. The term
"alienation" was not to be coined by Karl Marx for at least another decade, and Gogol could not
have been familiar with that concept, but that is in essence what Gogol’s St. Petersburg stories
are all about, in one way or another.

Sociologically, what is remarkable about “The Overcoat” is its description of urban alienation
that firmly places it within the context of the other stories of the St. Petersburg cycle, written
some five years before it. But while the heroes of the other St. Petersburg stories chafe under the
burden of loneliness and alienation, the hero of “The Overcoat” seems to have chosen them of
his own free will as his natural mode of existence. The real literary triumph of “The
Overcoat” is the sympathy the story arouses in the reader for the least human and least
prepossessing character in all literature, a man whom the author, furthermore, systematically
undercuts and ridicules.

The very name Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is calculated to invite contempt and derision.
The original Greek ‘Acacius’ means "immaculate" or "without blemish' but its Russian version
sounds in pronunciation Suspiciously as if it might be derived from ‘okakat’ or ‘obkakat’, 'to
beshit' or "to cover with excrement."

Akaky is not only pathetic; he is denied the dignity of being anything in particular. He is not
totally bald but “slightly bald,” not definitely pockmarked but “somewhat pockmarked,” not
even obviously red-haired or properly nearsighted but “somewhat red-haired” and “somewhat
nearsighted”. Gogol uses the indeterminacy of Akaky’s physical appearance to communicate
forcefully Akaky’s complete lack of assertiveness. No one in his department can remember when
he was hired or who hired him. With his haemorrhoidal complexion, his untidy clothes always
bespattered with garbage, with watermelon rinds and melon peelings clinging to his hat, and the
flies in his soup he eats without noticing them, to say nothing of his excremental name, Akaky is
a character who would hardly seem calculated to arouse the reader's sympathy or to be appealing.
Gogol downgrades the man's mentality and his personal character with equal ruthlessness. An
incoherent, almost mindless loner, on the verge of muteness and mental retardation, Akaky
speaks in stutters and fragments. He has no interest in the surrounding world, of which he takes
notice only as much as is necessary to insure his bare survival. The narrator says that in the
department he was shown no respect at all and even the caretakers never acknowledged him and
treated him with contempt.

Akaky's odd speech patterns provide both comedy and tragedy. His inability to finish sentences
is innately absurd but it causes him real damage. He struggles to explain his financial limitations
to Petrovich. He can't clearly relate the story of the stolen coat to higher officials. Since no one
can understand him, he remains linguistically cut off from the wider world. His death scene
highlights this loneliness as his last words express a desire, however inscrutable his fantastical
dreams may be, to be reunited with his coat, indicating his most important connection in life was
with the coat and not with another human. The narrator says Akaky's death affected no one. The
prominent personage may be just as lonely. Paralyzed by the fear of addressing a higher- or
lower-ranking official incorrectly, he's not much more articulate than Akaky in conversation.
Others find him wearisome and dull. He alienates coworkers by yelling phrases he thinks will
make him seem important. When Akaky and the ‘VIP’ meet for the first time, neither of them
can step out of their practiced roles. Akaky can't ask for help and the prominent personage can't
offer help. Both men are stuck in a system that cuts off meaningful interaction at its root.

The theme of human solitude and of urban alienation that the story so powerfully sounds can
speak much more eloquently to the twenty first-century imagination than it could have to the
people of Gogol's time. After Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Chekhov's
"Heartache" and Kafka's “The Trial”, we can see that "The Overcoat" was the initiator of the
great modern tradition of writing about the solitary and vulnerable individual human being
rejected or threatened by a dehumanized collective.