Techniques in Action: The Overcoat

In the department of — but it is better not to name the department. There is nothing more touchy than departments, regiments, government offices, and, in general, every kind of official body. Suffice it to say, then, that in a certain department there worked a clerk; a clerk whom no one could call very remarkable. He was short, somewhat pock-marked, somewhat red-haired, even somewhat short-sighted, with a small bald patch on the top of his head, with wrinkles on both sides of his cheeks, and a complexion of the kind known as haemorrhoidal. There is no help for it: the climate of Petersburg is to blame. As for his rank — for with us the rank must be announced before anything else — he was what is called an eternal titular councillor; over whom, as is well known, every kind of writer has made jokes, having the unbecoming habit of attacking those who cannot bite back.

The clerk’s surname was Bashmachkin. From the very word one may see that it was once derived from bashmak — a shoe. But when, how, and on what occasion this happened, no one knows. His father, and his grandfather, and even his brother-in-law, and all the Bashmachkins, wore boots, having them re-soled only three times a year. His name was Akaky Akakievich.

In the department Akaky Akakievich was treated with not the slightest respect. The porters not only did not rise from their seats when he passed by, but did not even look at him, as though a common fly had flown across the reception-room. The young clerks chuckled and made jokes at his expense, so far as their wit allowed; told stories at his elbow of his landlady, an old woman of seventy; declared that she beat him; inquired when his wedding-day might be; sprinkled torn pieces of paper over his head, calling them snow. But Akaky Akakievich answered not a syllable, as though there had been no one before him. It did not even affect his work: in the midst of all these annoyances he made not a single error in his copying. Only when the joke became insupportable, when they jolted his arm and prevented him from going on with his work, did he say, “Let me alone! Why do you insult me?” And there was something strange in the words and in the voice in which they were uttered. There was in it something so moving, so prone to pity, that one young man, newly entered, who, following the example of the others, had allowed himself to make sport of him, suddenly stopped short, as though something had pierced him through; and from that time forward something seemed to change within him. He saw his colleagues with new eyes, and many times afterwards, in the midst of the most cheerful moments, there rose before him the little clerk with the bald patch, with his moving words, “Let me alone! Why do you insult me?”

It would be hard to find a man who lived in his work as did Akaky Akakievich. To say that he was zealous in his work is to say nothing: he loved his copying. In that copying he saw a kind of varied and pleasant world all his own. Enjoyment was written on his face: some letters were favourites with him, and when he encountered one of them, he was beside himself; he smiled, winked, helped it on with his lips, so that one could read on his face every letter that his pen was tracing. If rewards had been given according to the measure of zeal, he would, to his own surprise, have found himself made a State Councillor; but he had earned, as his fellow clerks put it, a buckle in his buttonhole and piles in his behind.

Even outside the office Akaky Akakievich could not pass without remarking on certain pages where the handwriting was particularly fine; and he was happy. He took some copying home with him. After eating his supper he sat down at the table and copied papers brought from his office, and if there were none, he made copies expressly for his own pleasure — especially if the document was a remarkable one: remarkable not for the beauty of its style, but only for the fact that it was addressed to some new and important person.

There is in Petersburg a powerful foe of all who receive a salary of four hundred roubles a year, or thereabouts. This foe is no other than the cold of the north, although it is said to be very wholesome. Between eight and nine in the morning, just when the streets are full of clerks going to their offices, the cold gives all noses such violent and sharp tweaks, without distinction, that the poor fellows do not know what to do with them. At such a time, when even the foreheads of those in important posts ache with the cold and tears come to their eyes, the titular councillors are sometimes quite without defence. Their only salvation lies in racing as fast as possible, in their thin little overcoats, through five or six streets, and then stamping their feet in the porter’s room until all the faculties and gifts for office work, frozen on the way, may thaw out.

That same evening, after the celebration in the assistant chief’s flat, Akaky Akakievich went on his way in the most cheerful frame of mind he had ever known. He even ran for a moment after some lady or other who had passed by him like a flash of lightning, every part of her body in motion; but he checked himself at once, and went on again very gently as before, even wondering himself where this sudden tendency to break into a run had come from.

Soon the deserted streets, which are not particularly bright even by day, became, after his cheerful evening, even drearier and more lonely; the lamps gleamed only at intervals, less and less frequently; oil was running short. Then came the wooden houses and the fences; not a soul anywhere; only the snow gleamed on the streets, and the boarded-up huts, with their closed shutters, made sad black blotches. He approached the place where the street was crossed by an endless square, the houses on the other side of which were scarcely visible — a frightful desert.

Far off, God knows where, twinkled a tiny light in some sentry-box, which seemed to stand on the very edge of the world. Akaky Akakievich’s cheerfulness diminished. He stepped into the square not without a kind of involuntary apprehension, as though his heart had warned him of some misfortune. He looked back, and to either side: it was a sea all round him. “No, better not look,” he thought, and went on with his eyes closed.

When he opened them to see whether the square was almost at an end, he suddenly saw, standing before him almost at his very nose, men with moustaches, of what sort he could not even distinguish. A mist filled his eyes, and his chest began to throb.

“Why, that overcoat is mine!” said one of them in a thunderous voice, seizing him by the collar. Akaky Akakievich was about to shout “Help!” when another applied to his mouth a fist as big as a clerk’s head, with the words, “Just you shout!” Akaky Akakievich felt them take off his overcoat and give him a kick with the knee; he fell back into the snow, and felt nothing more.

The next day Akaky Akakievich appeared at the office in his old dressing-gown, which had become still more wretched. The story of the robbery, in spite of certain clerks not letting pass even this occasion for ridicule, touched many. They decided at once to take up a subscription for him — but they collected only a very small sum, for the officers had spent enough already on a subscription for the portrait of the director, and on some volume or other proposed by the head of the department, in friendship with the author; and so the sum proved very trifling.

One of them, moved by sympathy, advised Akaky Akakievich, at the very least, to go to a very important person. The very important person had recently been promoted into the rank, having lately been an unimportant person. Moreover, his position was now compounded by his relations with the lesser ranks: with these he had decided to be severe. His usual conversation with subordinates resounded with severity, and consisted, for the most part, of three sentences: “How dare you?” “Do you know to whom you are speaking?” and “Do you know who stands before you?”

“Do you know to whom you are speaking? Do you know who stands before you?”

He stamped his foot, raising his voice to so loud a note that even a man other than Akaky Akakievich would have been frightened. Akaky Akakievich grew faint, staggered, trembled in all his body, and could no longer stand; if the porters had not come running to support him, he would have fallen to the floor. He was carried out almost senseless.

The snow caught him on the way home; the wind, in Petersburg fashion, blew on him from all four sides at once. In one moment his throat was swollen, and he reached home unable to utter a single word. The next day a violent fever showed itself. Thanks to the generous assistance of the Petersburg climate, the disease developed faster than could be expected; and when the doctor came, he, after feeling the pulse, could find nothing better to do than to order a poultice — merely that the patient might not be without the beneficent aid of medicine.

Akaky Akakievich was buried. Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakievich, as though he had never been in it. A creature vanished and was gone whose cause no one had ever espoused, who was dear to no one, interesting to no one, who had not even attracted the notice of the naturalist who never misses a chance of impaling even the commonest fly upon a pin and examining it through a microscope — a creature who patiently endured the office jeers and went to his grave without having performed one extraordinary deed; though, towards the end of his life, the flashing apparition of an overcoat had stirred his life into a moment of brightness, as the apparition of an overcoat stirs the lives of the mighty of this world.

But yet Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakievich, as though he had never been in it. Yet from that day a strange phenomenon began to occur in Petersburg. Near the Kalinkin Bridge, and far beyond it, a ghost showed itself in the form of a clerk, looking for some stolen overcoat; and, on pretext of this lost overcoat, snatching from the shoulders, without regard for rank or title, every kind of overcoat: lined with cat, beaver, fox; bear-skin, wadded — in a word, every kind of fur and skin which men have devised for the covering of their own. One of the office officials, with his own eyes, saw the ghost, and recognised in it none other than Akaky Akakievich.

The very important person, since the day he had given the dressing-down to poor Akaky Akakievich, had felt within him a kind of unaccountable disquiet. This sensation increased on hearing that the unfortunate clerk was no more. After visiting a friend that evening, he was returning home in his sledge through the wide streets. Suddenly he felt that something had seized him forcibly by the collar. Looking round, he saw a man of short stature, in an old worn-out uniform, and recognised, not without horror, that this was Akaky Akakievich. The clerk’s face was white as snow, and looked exactly like a corpse’s. But the horror of the very important person mounted higher when he saw the lips of the corpse move and, with the chill of the grave on his breath, utter the following words:

“Ah! here you are at last! At last I have you, so to speak, by the collar! It’s your overcoat that I need! You took no trouble about mine — you even gave me a dressing-down. So now give up your own!”

The poor very important person almost died. Brave as he was in the office and before subordinates, and although, at the sight of his manly figure and bearing, every one said, “Ugh, what a character!” — at this critical moment he, like many men of heroic appearance, felt such terror that he began, not without reason, to fear an attack of some kind upon his nerves. He himself even threw off his overcoat as quickly as possible, and shouted to the coachman, in a voice that did not sound his own, “Drive home as fast as possible!”