The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Nikolai Gogol · Shinel · a story in one continuous telling · first printed in the third volume of Gogol’s collected works, St Petersburg, 1842 · scored on Gogol’s Russian, read from knowledge, with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation (1998) beside it for sense; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, and no translation quoted
Mode
Comic tale in a speaking voice (skaz); a realist story of poverty turned fantastic at its close; pathos and mockery in the same sentence
Mythos
The little man, built here from a name, a rank, a task and a coat; the saint’s life inverted; the dead who return as the only justice
Phase
A life given at the font and told in its last winter: the months of saving, the theft, the fever and the death, and the ghost afterwards
Presentation
Fiction; one continuous story without chapters, told by a garrulous narrator who will not name the department, digresses and shrugs
Register
From the anecdote and the comic list to one paragraph of plain pity, a delirium, the inventory of a dead man’s effects and the grotesque at the close
Scale
One clerk, a tailor and his wife, a department, a significant person, and St Petersburg in its frost
Governing Proposition
A copying clerk of the ninth rank, on four hundred roubles a year, saves for months to replace a coat the office calls a housecoat, is robbed of the new one in a vast square at night, is rebuked by a significant person to whom he appeals, and dies of fever; afterwards a ghost takes coats from officials’ shoulders, the significant person’s among them. The wager of the story is that a comic voice which treats its hero as the world does, as an occasion for anecdote, can show what an order of rank does to a man, and can let one sentence of pity break through it and sink again.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“В департаменте… но лучше не называть, в каком департаменте.”
In the department… but better not to name which department. The story begins by withholding, and the withholding is official. The narrator keeps the discretion of the bureaucracy he describes, and from the first line he is part of it: a voice that knows how to be careful about a department and has no care to spare for the man who works there. The man is Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a titular councillor, the ninth of the fourteen ranks, a copying clerk on four hundred roubles a year.
His life is given at the font. The mother is offered a run of grotesque saints’ names from the calendar, rejects them one after another, and the child is called after his father: Akaky, son of Akaky. The comedy of the list is the first fact of his fate. He is given no name of his own, and nothing afterwards will be his own except, for a few weeks, a coat. The name he gets is a saint’s, from the Greek for “without evil”, and the story will give its meek bearer a passion and a return from the grave that no saint’s life would allow.
The story appeared in 1842, in the third volume of Gogol’s collected works, printed in St Petersburg. It runs as one continuous telling, without chapters. Gogol had already set a clerk in a grotesque Petersburg in “Diary of a Madman” (1835) and “The Nose” (1836); here the clerk is made the whole subject, and the voice that tells him is the story’s chief invention. It is garrulous and digressive, distracted by a snuffbox or a name, forever qualifying with an “even” that makes its own attention ridiculous. It treats Akaky as the department does, as an occasion for anecdote.
Movement II
Akaky copies, and the other clerks mock him. Against all of it he has one plea: “Оставьте меня, зачем вы меня обижаете?”
Leave me alone, why do you insult me? The words are the meekest in the story, and the story places them where it places everything about him, inside an anecdote told by someone who finds him funny.
A young clerk hears something else inside the plea: “Я брат твой.”
I am your brother. He is changed for life by it. For one paragraph the narrating voice gives way, and plain pity speaks in it. The sentence carries the story’s claim against everything around it: that the copying clerk, mocked by his colleagues and unseen by his superiors, is kin to the one who mocks him.
Then the voice resumes, and it does not spare the young clerk either. The pity is offered and taken back in the same manner, and the reader who was moved is invited, a line later, to laugh. Nothing in the story follows from the brother. The order that ranks Akaky goes on as before. The story knows that sympathy and mockery are made of the same words, and that a society’s talk about its lowest member can be mockery with pity in it, and the pity can do nothing.
Movement III
His coat is worn so thin that the office no longer calls it a coat but a housecoat. Petersburg has an enemy for everyone who earns four hundred roubles a year, and it is the frost. Akaky takes the old coat to the tailor Petrovich, once a serf, who lives with his wife. Petrovich has a snuffbox with a general on it, and the general has had his face poked through and pasted over. In this world that is what a general is: a picture with a hole for a face.
A new coat must be made. Akaky saves for it for months, and walks on tiptoe in the street to spare his soles. The coat, which does not yet exist, becomes the companion of his life, as a bride might be, and the story lets the garment take her place. The price of the coat is the measure of everything he gives up to have it, and so of everything he will lose.
The coat is made, and there is a party, which he attends. The narrator, who has never been much interested in Akaky, lets the party run on and then sends him home across the city in the dark. The story has moved by one line from the font to here, birth to coat, and it will not turn aside from that line again.
Movement IV
The way home crosses a vast square at night, wide and dark, with a watchman’s booth so far off that it seems to stand at the end of the world. There he is robbed of the coat. He appeals first to the police, and then to a significant person, an official whose whole self is his rank.
The significant person rebukes him, and Akaky is carried out half dead. The rebuke is the state’s whole answer to the loss of a coat, and to the loss of a life’s one possession. He takes a fever. In his delirium the meekest of clerks swears at his excellency. He dies.
The story counts out what he left: goose quills, a quire of paper, socks, buttons, and the old housecoat. The list is given as flatly as anything in the narrator’s voice, and it is the story’s deepest pathos. A life that had been made into a function ends as an inventory, and the inventory is short, and the coat for which the life was spent is not in it.
Movement V
Then the story turns fantastic without changing its tone. A ghost is seen at night by the Kalinkin bridge, taking coats from the shoulders of officials. The realist world has offered Akaky no redress, so the story leaves realism to supply it, and tells the haunting in the same shrugging voice in which it told the life. The dead man is given no justice but a coat, as the child was given no name but his father’s.
The ghost finds the significant person and takes his coat from his shoulders. Whether the significant person is changed by it the story leaves uncertain. And there is a last apparition, seen by a watchman: a figure taller than Akaky and with a moustache, which may be the ghost and may be the thief. The story ends on it, and leaves the one redress it granted in doubt.
Every reading since has found the story’s questions still open. Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1846), gave its own clerk, Devushkin, “The Overcoat” to read, and he is wounded by it. Belinsky’s circle read it as protest; Boris Eikhenbaum, in “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” (1919), as a construction in which the humane passage is a device; Chizhevsky as a story of the devil and of the word “even”; Nabokov as a comedy of holes in the world. The order of rank it describes is long gone, and the story is read now for what that order pressed on a man, and for the one sentence in which someone saw him.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive and finds almost nothing to take. The naming at the font, where the mother rejects a run of grotesque saints’ names from the calendar and the child is called after his father, must stay: it fixes a life given no choice from the first page. The mockery in the office must stay, since it carries the plea and the brother. The months of saving, walking on tiptoe to spare his soles, must stay, because the coat’s price is the measure of the loss. The theft, the significant person, the death and the ghost are one chain. The narrator’s digressions look removable and are not: they are the voice that ignores Akaky as the world does. What holds the axis is a handful of digressive runs, the party and some of the narrator’s asides about the ghost, which could be shortened with the knowledge unchanged.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in a society ordered by rank a person can be reduced to a function so wholly that a single thing comes to hold the whole of his life, and the loss of that thing can kill him; and the order that ranks him is indifferent by design, from the clerks who mock him to the significant person, whose self is his rank. Against it the story plants one sentence. A young clerk hears, inside Akaky’s plea to be left alone, other words: “Я брат твой” (I am your brother). The significant person’s rebuke is the state’s whole answer; the ghost is the only redress. Held off the top because the story withdraws its sympathy as soon as it grants it: the narrator mocks the clerk who hears the words, and Akaky with him, so that what is disclosed is partly taken back by the manner that discloses it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height comes rarely, and it comes through the comic surface. The humane passage is the ethical sublime in a single sentence. The square where Akaky is robbed, wide and dark, with a watchman’s booth so far off that it seems to stand at the end of the world, carries a cold terror. In his delirium the meekest of clerks swears at his excellency, and the passage reaches the dreadful. The inventory of his effects, goose quills, a quire of paper, socks, buttons and the old coat, is a height of pathos reached by listing. The ghost tearing the coat from the significant person’s shoulders is grotesque grandeur. Held in the middle eights because the governing register is comic deadpan, which keeps every elevation brief by design, and because the heights are moments within a short story rather than a structure that rises again and again.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, and built here first. The little man of Russian literature is this clerk: the type that later books evoke is constructed in this one, out of a name, a rank, a task and a coat. The name carries a pattern. Akaky, from the Greek for “without evil”, is a saint’s name, and the story has long been read as a saint’s life turned inside out: the meek copyist whose one passion is a garment, and who comes back from the grave. The coat becomes a bride, a companion for his life. The return of the dead as avenger is load-bearing, since it is the plot’s only justice. And the particular stays particular throughout: four hundred roubles, the tailor, the snuffbox, the socks in the inventory. Held off the top because the revenant is left ambiguous and half joking, so that the myth is built and then shrugged at.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the sentimental tale of the poor and humble that runs from Karamzin, Pushkin’s “The Stationmaster” (1831) with its wronged little official, Sterne’s digressive narrator and Hoffmann’s fantastic. Gogol’s own “Diary of a Madman” (1835) and “The Nose” (1836) had already set a clerk in a grotesque Petersburg. The swerve is the fusion: a story whose narration is a comic oral performance in which pathos and mockery sit in the same sentence; a realist tale of poverty that turns fantastic at the end without changing its tone; and a hero of no interest made the whole subject. The stake was real: the story offers its sympathy in a manner that invites the reader to laugh at the one who receives it, and it risked being taken for a joke or for a sermon. Held at this figure because much of the ground was Gogol’s own, broken already in the Petersburg tales.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The narrator’s voice, garrulous, digressive, distracted by a snuffbox or a name, enacts the world’s inattention: it treats Akaky as the department does, as an occasion for anecdote. Into it the humane passage breaks for one paragraph, and the form itself shows a conscience surfacing in an indifferent discourse and sinking again. Told plainly, the story would be a sentimental tale with a moral; told in this voice, it knows that sympathy and mockery are made of the same words. The fantastic ending is the second instrument: the realist world offers no redress, so the form leaves realism to supply it, and the ghost’s comic vagueness keeps the redress unreliable. Boris Eikhenbaum’s essay “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” (1919) is a study of exactly this. Held off the top only by the digressions that are not instruments.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over nearly two centuries. Belinsky’s circle read the story as humanitarian protest; Eikhenbaum (1919) as a grotesque construction in which the humane passage is a device; Dmitry Chizhevsky (1938) as a story of the devil and of the word “even”; Nabokov, in his Nikolai Gogol (1944), as a metaphysical comedy of holes in the world, refusing the social reading; later critics as a saint’s life inverted, as a tale of desire displaced onto a thing, as a text about copying and writing. The readings do not cancel one another. The questions the story plants stay open: whether the humane passage is sincere; whether the ghost is Akaky, and whether the last apparition, taller and moustached, is the thief; whether the significant person is changed. Held below the top because the yield of a story this short is concentrated, and part of the return is to its manner more than to new meaning.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is Russian prose of the 1840s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: the meanest official became a subject that could bear the whole weight of a story, and a comic narrating voice became an instrument of moral seriousness. Held below the top because Pushkin had opened the subject, and Gogol’s own tales the manner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1846), answers the story directly, since its clerk, Devushkin, reads “The Overcoat” and is wounded by it; the figure of the little man runs on through Russian fiction for the rest of the century; and the story founded a theory of narration, in Eikhenbaum’s essay of 1919, on which the narration in a speaking voice that Russian criticism calls skaz is still studied.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and eighty-four years. Form: the story survives whole and legible, and nothing that makes it is lost. Presence is as wide as its span allows: read in Russian schools continuously, translated into most written languages, anthologised wherever the short story is taught, and filmed and animated again and again, by Kozintsev and Trauberg (1926), by Alberto Lattuada as Il cappotto (1952), by Aleksei Batalov (1959), and by Yuri Norstein, whose animated version has been in the making for decades. It stands at the widest presence its span can show, and no higher. Fabric carries no charge. The story has outlived the Table of Ranks it depicts, and is read now for what that order pressed on a man.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Gogol’s Russian, so far as it can be heard; its sound beyond that is neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact: a single line from birth to coat to theft to death to ghost, with the economy of a fable, carried by a voice that seems to wander and never loses the line. The comic devices are load-bearing: the list of rejected saints’ names; the name Akaky Akakievich itself, with its repeated syllables; the tailor’s snuffbox, whose general has had his face poked through and pasted over; the qualifying “even” that makes the narrator’s attention ridiculous. The modulation from comedy to the humane paragraph and back is managed within a page, and the inventory of the dead man’s effects is a model of pathos by plain listing. Held below the top because the digressive tics sometimes run on for their own pleasure, and the party is slacker than the rest.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One law governs: in this world things outrank persons and persons become things, so that a coat can be a bride, a general a picture with a hole for a face, a man a function, and rank a soul. Take the two most distant elements: the comic naming at the font and the ghost tearing coats from the shoulders of officials at night. They obey the same law. The child is given no name but his father’s, the dead man is given no justice but a coat, and in both the world’s order fixes what a person may have. The humane passage obeys the law as its exception: the one moment a person is seen. Charged: the ending’s change of key from realist to fantastic has struck many readers as a break, and the last apparition, not clearly Akaky, loosens the law just where the story needs it firmest.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what one story holds. The state: the department, the ranks, the police, the significant person. Labour: copying, and the tailor’s trade. Class: a clerk, a tailor who was a serf and his wife, a general. Money: four hundred roubles a year, and months of saving. The city and the natural order: Petersburg and its frost, the enemy of all who earn four hundred a year. The sacred: the calendar of saints, the brother, the dead who return. Death and its effects. Desire, displaced onto a garment, with the significant person’s mistress as its counterweight. They are integrated, not listed: every order passes through one coat. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what the form leaves out: the consciousness at the centre is nearly empty by design, the family and history are absent, and the span is one man’s last winter. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form, The Imperishable and The Made at 9.2. A narrating voice that treats its hero as the world does and lets one paragraph of pity break through it, with a fantastic close that supplies the redress realism withholds; a story whole after a hundred and eighty-four years, read in schools, anthologised and filmed wherever the short story is known; and a construction with the economy of a fable, carried by comic devices that bear the weight.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3, held by what the form leaves out: the consciousness at the centre is nearly empty by design, the family and history are absent, and the span is one man’s last winter; the state, labour, class, money, the city, the sacred and death all pass through one coat. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.5: heights reached through the comic surface, the sentence of pity, the square at night, the delirium and the inventory, each kept brief by the deadpan register.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Nikolai Gogol’s Шинель (Shinel, The Overcoat), scored as the story as it first appeared in the third volume of his collected works (Sochineniya, St Petersburg, 1842): one continuous story, without chapters. Every axis is judged on the story in Gogol’s Russian. No text, Russian or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Russian is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening sentence, Akaky’s plea and the words the young clerk hears in it; each is followed by its sense in plain words, unquoted, and events are paraphrased. Translation · Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (1998), read beside for sense, chosen because it keeps the narrator’s verbal tics and the word “even” where Gogol has them; Constance Garnett’s version and the passages Nabokov translated in his Nikolai Gogol (1944) read beside it. No translation is quoted, and none is charged to the story. The sound of Gogol’s Russian beyond what this reading can hear is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the story’s length in pages and words, any earlier separate printing, the tailor’s prices, where the last apparition is seen, the history of the text under the censor, the story’s hagiographic sources and its debts outside Russia, are not given. The story has no divisions, and passages are cited by episode.