Few writers have understood the absurdity of human dignity quite like Nikolai Gogol.
In The Overcoat and Other Short Stories, the great nineteenth-century Russian writer turns his attention to petty officials, provincial eccentrics and social climbers, all of whom inhabit a world in which bureaucracy acquires the force of destiny, ordinary objects become objects of obsession, and the distinction between the ridiculous and the tragic is kinda, null.
The collection includes The Overcoat, in which an impoverished clerk's longing for a new coat develops into a devastating account of social indifference, alongside The Nose, The Diary of a Madman and other stories that move between satire, grotesque fantasy and psychological unease. Gogol's narrative voice is itself part of the disturbance: digressive, intrusive, contradictory and frequently incapable of maintaining the seriousness its subject supposedly demands.
A foundational influence on Dostoevsky, Kafka and the literature of bureaucratic absurdity, Gogol remains particularly interesting for his treatment of identity as something precariously dependent upon recognition, status and the arbitrary conventions of social life. Translated from Russian by David Magarshack.
Dover Publications, New York, 1992. Dover Thrift Editions paperback, an unabridged selection of Gogol's short fiction. Illustrated wrappers with light surface rubbing and minor edgewear. Pages show some age-toning; internally appears clean and well preserved.
