The Overcoat Study Guide

Nikolai Gogol was born in a Ukrainian village in the Russian Empire to parents of the petty gentry. He began writing when he attended university, and afterwards went to St. Petersburg, hoping to achieve success in the literary world. His self-published poetry was universally mocked, but his first book of short stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), was successful. He wrote prolifically and travelled extensively, spending time in Germany and Switzerland, and living for twelve years in Rome. During this time he completed some of his most famous works, including Dead Souls (1842) and “The Overcoat” (1842). In his last few years, Gogol experienced ill health and depression. After burning some of his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls (which was meant to be a trilogy), Gogol spent nine days in bed, refusing all food, until he died. Nikolai Gogol is now known as one of the foremost writers in the Russian language, one of the key figures in Russian literary realism, and a predecessor of the styles of Surrealism and the grotesque.

The Russian Empire in the 19th century was administered by a large, slow, and corrupt government, which was headed by the emperor, or Tsar. Many of the civil servants in the Russian bureaucracy were poorly paid and uneducated. These conditions created a system in which officials exploited their government status by taking bribes, and in which many bureaucrats were unqualified for their jobs. In this stagnant environment, Nikolai Gogol identified Akaky Akakievich, the main character of “The Overcoat,” as the kind of insignificant individual who both suffered under the Empire’s oppression and was the epitome of bureaucratic small-mindedness.

Gogol wrote other satires of the Russian Empire, including Dead Souls and “The Government Inspector,” and the absurd aspect of his work was especially apparent in his story “The Nose.” Gogol’s own writing was influenced by the works of Alexander Pushkin, the famous Russian poet and author of Eugene Onegin. “The Overcoat” then powerfully affected the Russian literature that followed it, so much so that Fyodor Dostoevsky (author of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment) said, “We all come out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’.” The elements of the grotesque, the surreal, and the absurd in Gogol’s work were especially ahead of their time, and are still influential even to contemporary writers. Those particularly influenced by Gogol include Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Vladimir Nabokov.