From Under the Overcoat (27 page)

By setting this marital crisis entirely within a party — in effect a public forum — Chekhov created room to explore more than a personal domestic crisis. The extremely ‘correct’ behaviours required of both Olga and Peter as hosts amplify the chasm between man and wife; the more agitated they become, the more delighted they appear to their guests. The headiness of the event — the food, drink and false gaiety — deprives Olga of a context in which she can contemplate and assess the significance of an eavesdropped conversation. Tragedy occurs before the party finishes, before she has a chance to reflect rationally on what she has heard.

‘
SLEEPING BEAUTY’ IS A
tale of wakeful euphoria and somnolent despair. The origins of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (or ‘Rosebud’) are difficult to trace — versions have been present in different cultures for centuries, with some experts believing that
Rosebud’s tribulations were originally inspired by the stories of saints. French writer Charles Perrault included the tale ‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’ in his 1697 collection translated as
The Tales of Mother Goose
, but this version ran on past the happy awakening to deliver Rosebud and her two children (the off spring of the handsome prince) to further danger at the cannibalistic hands of the prince’s evil mother. Another version — acknowledged by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their notes to ‘Rosebud’
12
— was created in 1634 by Giovanni Battista Basile in his work
Pentamerone
. That story was called ‘Son, Moon and Talia’. The Brothers Grimm sourced most of their tales directly from German peasants
13
and the notes accompanying ‘Rosebud’ source its origin as the Hessian story ‘Dornroschen’.

The story, as told by the Brothers Grimm, starts with a king and queen who learn they are to have a child. A great party is thrown, but an uninvited fairy wreaks revenge by cursing the child to die at fifteen after pricking her finger on a spindle. Another fairy guest mitigates the promise, turning the death sentence to that of one hundred years’ sleep. The curse is fulfilled and the entire court submits to the sleep. A thorn-ridden thicket grows around the palace. The curse is broken by a prince who succeeds in breaking through the thicket and kissing the princess, awakening her. They marry and live happily ever after.

NIKOLAY GOGOL WAS BORN
in Ukraine in 1809 and died in Russia in 1852. ‘The Overcoat’ has been described as the ‘first appearance in fiction of the Little Man’.
14

Set in St Petersburg, it tells the simple story of Akaky Akakyevitch, a poor, government clerk of low rank who, mocked by his colleagues for his threadbare overcoat, puts himself through enormous hardship to save enough money to buy a new one. A superior from his office hosts a party to celebrate Akakyevitch’s purchase, but on the way home from the occasion Akakyevitch is robbed of the coat. He turns for help to an important person in authority, but is ridiculed. Akakyevitch, coatless, dies of a fever brought on by the severe St Petersburg winter.

The story seems to find its natural ending at that point but Gogol continues the tale to a fantastical conclusion, bringing Akakyevitch back as a ghost. The ghost roams the city streets, ripping overcoats off passers-by, including, eventually, the important person. The story ends with a policeman’s account of a ghost disappearing into the night, shaking his fist and asking ‘What do you want?’ The appearance of the ghost has — and continues — to spark literary debate as to Gogol’s intentions in extending the story past the death of Akakyevitch.

I
n the department of … but I had better not mention in what department. There is nothing in the world more readily moved to wrath than a department, a regiment, a government office, and in fact any sort of official body. Nowadays every private individual considers all society insulted in his person. I have been told that very lately a petition was handed in from a police-captain of what town I don't recollect, and that in this petition he set forth clearly that the institutions of the State were in danger and that its sacred name was being taken in vain; and, in proof thereof, he appended to his petition an enormously long volume of some work of romance in which a police-captain appeared
on every tenth page, occasionally, indeed, in an intoxicated condition. And so, to avoid any unpleasantness, we had better call the department of which we are speaking a certain department.

And so in a certain department there was a government clerk; a clerk of whom it cannot be said that he was very remarkable; he was short, somewhat pock-marked, with rather reddish hair and rather dim, bleary eyes, with a small bald patch on the top of his head, with wrinkles on both sides of his cheeks and the sort of complexion which is usually associated with haemorrhoids … no help for that, it is the Petersburg climate. As for his grade in the service (for among us the grade is what must be put first), he was what is called a perpetual titular councillor, a class at which, as we all know, various writers who indulge in the praiseworthy habit of attacking those who cannot defend themselves jeer and jibe to their hearts' content. This clerk's surname was Bashmatchkin. From the very name it was clear that it must have been derived from a shoe (
bashmak
); but when and under what circumstances it was derived from a shoe, it is impossible to say. Both his father and his grandfather and even his brother-in-law, and all the Bashmatchkins without exception wore boots, which they simply re-soled two or three times a year. His name was Akaky Akakyevitch. Perhaps it may strike the reader as a rather strange and far-fetched name, but I can assure him that it was not farfetched at all, that the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name. Akaky Akakyevitch was born towards nightfall, if my memory does not deceive me, on the twenty-third of March. His mother,
the wife of a government clerk, a very good woman, made arrangements in due course to christen the child. She was still lying in bed, facing the door, while on her right hand stood the godfather, an excellent man called Ivan Ivanovitch Yeroshkin, one of the head clerks in the Senate, and the godmother, the wife of a police official and a woman of rare qualities, Arina Semyonovna Byelobryushkov. Three names were offered to the happy mother for selection — Moky, Sossy, or the name of the martyr Hozdazat. ‘No,' thought the poor lady, ‘they are all such names!' To satisfy her, they opened the calendar at another place, and the names which turned up were: Trifily, Dula, Varahasy. ‘What an infliction!' said the mother. ‘What names they all are! I really never heard such names. Varadat or Varuh would be bad enough, but Trifily and Varahasy!' They turned over another page and the names were: Pavsikahy and Vahtisy. ‘Well, I see,' said the mother, ‘it is clear that it is his fate. Since that is how it is, he had better be called after his father, his father is Akaky, let the son be Akaky too.' This was how he came to be Akaky Akakyevitch. The baby was christened and cried and made wry faces during the ceremony, as though he foresaw that he would be a titular councillor. So that was how it all came to pass. We have recalled it here so that the reader may see for himself that it happened quite inevitably and that to give him any other name was out of the question. No one has been able to remember when and how long ago he entered the department, nor who gave him the job. However, many directors and higher officials of all sorts came and went, he was always seen in the same place, in the same position, at the very same duty, precisely the same copying clerk, so that
they used to declare that he must have been born a copying clerk in uniform all complete and with a bald patch on his head. No respect at all was shown him in the department. The porters, far from getting up from their seats when he came in, took no more notice of him than if a simple fly had flown across the vestibule. His superiors treated him with a sort of domineering chilliness. The head clerk's assistant used to throw papers under his nose without even saying: ‘Copy this' or ‘Here is an interesting, nice little case' or some agreeable remark of the sort, as is usually done in well-behaved offices. And he would take it, gazing only at the paper without looking to see who had put it there and whether he had the right to do so; he would take it and at once set to work to copy it. The young clerks jeered and made jokes at him to the best of their clerkly wit, and told before his face all sorts of stories of their own invention about him; they would say of his landlady, an old woman of about seventy, that she beat him, would enquire when the wedding was to take place, and would scatter bits of paper on his head, calling them snow. Akaky Akakyevitch never answered a word, however, but behaved as though there was no one there. It had no influence on his work even; in the midst of all this teasing, he never made a single mistake in his copying. Only when the jokes were too unbearable, when they jolted his arm and prevented him from going on with his work, he would bring out: ‘Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?' and there was something strange in his words and in the voice in which they were uttered. There was a note in it of something that aroused compassion, so that one young man, new to the office, who, following the example of the rest, had allowed himself to
mock at him, suddenly stopped as though cut to the heart, and from that time forth, everything was, as it were, changed and appeared in a different light to him. Some unnatural force seemed to thrust him away from the companions with whom he had become acquainted, accepting them as wellbred, polished people.

And long afterwards, at moments of great gaiety, the figure of the humble little clerk with a bald patch on his head rose before him with his heart-rending words: ‘Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?' and in those heart-rending words he heard others: ‘I am your brother.' And the poor young man hid his face in his hands, and many times afterwards in his life he shuddered, seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage brutality lies hidden under refined, cultured politeness, and, my God! Even in a man whom the world accepts as a gentleman and a man of honour …

It would be hard to find a man who lived in his work as did Akaky Akakyevitch. To say that he was zealous in his work is not enough; no, he loved his work. In it, in that copying, he found a varied and agreeable world of his own. There was a look of enjoyment on his face; certain letters were favourites with him, and when he came to them he was delighted; he chuckled to himself and winked and moved his lips, so that it seemed as though every letter his pen was forming could be read in his face. If rewards had been given according to the measure of zeal in the service, he might to his amazement have even found himself a civil councillor; but all he gained in the service, as the wits, his fellow-clerks expressed it, was a buckle in his button-hole and a pain in his back. It cannot be said, however, that no notice had ever been taken of him.
One director, being a good-natured man and anxious to reward him for his long service, sent him something a little more important than his ordinary copying; he was instructed from a finished document to make some sort of a report for another office; the work consisted only altering the headings and in places changing the first person into the third. This cost him such an effort that it threw him into a regular perspiration: he mopped his brow and said at last, ‘No, better let me copy something.'

From that time forth they left him to go on copying for ever. It seemed as though nothing in the world existed for him outside his copying. He gave no thought at all to his clothes; his uniform was — well, not green but some sort of rusty, muddy colour. His collar was very short and narrow, so that, although his neck was not particularly long, yet, standing out of the collar, it looked as immensely long as those of the plaster kittens that wag their heads and are carried about on trays on the heads of dozens of foreigners living in Russia. And there were always things sticking to his uniform, either bits of hay or threads; moreover, he had a special art of passing under a window at the very moment when various rubbish was being flung out onto the street, and so was continually carrying off bits of melon rind and similar litter on his hat. He had never once in his life noticed what was being done and going on in the street, all those things at which, as we all know, his colleagues, the young clerks, always stare, carrying their sharp sight so far even as to notice any one on the other side of the pavement with a trouser strap hanging loose — a detail which always calls forth a sly grin. Whatever Akaky Akakyevitch looked at, he
saw nothing anywhere but his clear, evenly written lines, and only perhaps when a horse's head suddenly appeared from nowhere just on his shoulder, and its nostrils blew a perfect gale upon his cheek, did he notice that he was not in the middle of his writing, but rather in the middle of the street.

On reaching home, he would sit down at once to the table, hurriedly sup his soup and eat a piece of beef with an onion; he did not notice the taste at all, but ate it all up together with the flies and anything else that Providence chanced to send him. When he felt that his stomach was beginning to be full, he would rise up from the table, get out a bottle of ink and set to copying the papers he had brought home with him. When he had none to do, he would make a copy expressly for his own pleasure, particularly if the document were remarkable not for the beauty of its style but for the fact of its being addressed to some new or important personage.

Even at those hours when the grey Petersburg sky is completely overcast and the whole population of clerks have dined and eaten their fill, each as best he can, according to the salary he receives and his personal tastes, when they are all resting after the scratching of pens and bustle of the office, their own necessary work and other people's, and all the tasks that an over-zealous man voluntarily sets himself even beyond what is necessary, when the clerks are hastening to devote what is left of their time to pleasure; some more enterprising are flying to the theatre, others to the street to spend their leisure, staring at women's hats, some to spend the evening paying compliments to some attractive girl, the star of a little official circle, while some — and this is the most frequent of all — go simply to a fellow-clerk's
flat on the third or fourth storey, two little rooms with an entry or a kitchen, with some pretentions to style, with a lamp or some such article that has cost many sacrifices of dinners and excursions — at the time when all the clerks are scattered about the little flats of their friends, playing a tempestuous game of whist, sipping tea out of glasses to the accompaniment of farthing rusks, sucking in smoke from long pipes, telling, as the cards are dealt, some scandal that has floated down from higher circles, a pleasure which the Russian can never by any possibility deny himself, or when there is nothing better to talk about, repeating the everlasting anecdote of the commanding officer who was told that the tail had been cut off the horse on the Falconet monument — in short, even when every one was eagerly seeking entertainment, Akaky Akakyevitch did not give himself up to any amusement. No one could say that they had ever seen him at an evening party. After working to his heart's content, he would go to bed, smiling at the thought of the next day and wondering what God would send him to copy. So flowed on the peaceful life of a man who knew how to be content with his fate on a salary of four hundred roubles, and so perhaps it would have flowed on to extreme old age, had it not been for the various calamities that bestrew the path through life, not only of titular, but even of privy, actual court and all other councillors, even those who neither give counsel to others nor accept it themselves.

There is in Petersburg a mighty foe of all who receive a salary of four hundred roubles or about that sum. That foe is none other than our northern frost, although it is said to be very good for the health. Between eight and nine in the morning,
precisely at the hour when the streets are full of clerks going to their departments, the frost begins giving such sharp and stinging flips at all their noses indiscriminately that the poor fellows don't know what to do with them. At that time, when even those in the higher grade have a pain in their brows and tears in their eyes from the frost, the poor titular councillors are sometimes almost defenceless. Their only protection lies in running as fast as they can through five or six streets in a wretched, thin little overcoat and then warming their feet thoroughly in the porter's room, till all their faculties and qualifications for their various duties thaw again after being frozen on the way. Akaky Akakyevitch had for some time been feeling that his back and shoulders were particularly nipped by the cold, although he did try to run the regular distance as fast as he could. He wondered at last whether there were any defects in his overcoat. After examining it thoroughly in the privacy of his home, he discovered that in two or three places, to wit on the back and the shoulders, it had become a regular sieve; the cloth was so worn that you could see through it and the lining was coming out. I must observe that Akaky Akakyevitch's overcoat had also served as the butt for the jibes of the clerks. It had even been deprived of the honourable name of overcoat and had been referred to as the ‘dressing jacket.' It was indeed of rather a strange make. Its collar had been growing smaller year by year as it served to patch the other parts. The patches were not good specimens of the tailor's art, and they certainly looked clumsy and ugly. On seeing what was wrong, Akaky Akakyevitch decided that he would have to take the overcoat to Petrovitch, a tailor who lived on a fourth storey up a back staircase, and,
in spite of having only one eye and being pock-marked all over his face, was rather successful in repairing the trousers and coats of clerks and others — that is, when he was sober, be it understood, and had no other enterprise in his mind. Of this tailor I ought not, of course, to say much, but since it is now the rule that the character of every person in a novel must be completely drawn, well, there is no help for it, here is Petrovitch too. At first he was called simply Grigory, and was a serf belonging to some gentleman or other. He began to be called Petrovitch from the time that he got his freedom and began to drink rather heavily on every holiday, at first only on the chief holidays, but afterwards on all church holidays indiscriminately, wherever there is a cross in the calendar. On that side he was true to the customs of his forefathers, and when he quarrelled with his wife used to call her ‘a worldly woman and a German.' Since we have now mentioned the wife, it will be necessary to say a few words about her too, but unfortunately not much is known about her, except indeed that Petrovitch had a wife and that she wore a cap and not a kerchief, but apparently could not boast of beauty; anyway, none but the soldiers of the Guards peeped under her cap when they met her, and they twitched their moustaches and gave vent to a rather peculiar sound.