Knowing Nikolai Gogol and his "The Overcoat" Story

Some have taken the report in a realistic fashion as depicting social injustice, with its hero an urban dweller alter by his society in a version of the " slight man" against "the system." Others find the story to be more derisory and grotesque than realistic and consider the way Gogol uses language, such as puns and jokes, to create his story.

The realistic view is championed by Karlinsky, who complains that Russian critics in the nineteenth century "enveloped it in a thick hide of sentimentalization" (Karlinsky 54). He says it was identified as "the beginning of the benevolent trend in Russian lit timeture, the first depiction of the 'insulted and injured' runty man, the first realistic depiction of poverty and any tot up of some other literary firsts" (Karlinsky 54). This earlier view would agree with Elizabeth C. Shepard, who finds a social message in the work on, citing Gogol as to what he intended.

She notes that the work can be viewed as a standard for other writers seeking to discredit elitism, cosmopolitanism, and lack of truth in Russian literature:

But Gogol himself appears to reveal a polemical ocean liner in his garment when he implies at the outset of "The overcoating" that he is coming to the defense of the chinovnik, "a person who, as everyone knows, has been sneered at and joked about at will by assorted writers who have the praiseworthy habit of setting upon those who c

Tikos, Laszlo. Gogol's Art: A Search for Identity. 1996.

Tschizewskij, Dmitrij. "The Composition of Gogol's 'Overcoat.'" In Gogol's "Overcoat": An Anthology of Critical Essays, Elizabeth Trahan (ed.), 37-60. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982.

Some of the critical possibilities ar noted by Tikos when he writes,

Peace also notes that the story is often seen as one that initiated a whole era of Russian realism, and he also notes that on its face, the story seems to force out a whole tradition of Russian realism:

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