THE COAT

Nikolai Gogol

Stanitsa Popular Classics

stanitsa-kiev

Translated by

Enya Lennon

&

Yuri Goroulko-Shestopalov

Cover and book artwork by

Oksana Zdor

STANITSA-KIEV Ltd

160-a/87, Kharkovskoye shosse

Kiev, Ukraine 02091

e-mail: spt2109@gmail.com

www.stanitsa-kiev.com

ISBN 978-5-8218-0055-2 © Stanitsa-Kiev Ltd, 2025

In the department of… but it is better not to name the department. There is nothing more irritable than all manner of departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in short, every branch of public service. Each aggrieved individual nowadays believes all of society to be insulted along with them. Quite recently a complaint was received from a district chief of police, I cannot remember of what town, in which he plainly stated that all the imperial institutions were going to the dogs, and that his own blessed name was decidedly being taken in vain. And, as proof, he appended to the complaint a most enormous piece of romantic literature in which the district chief of police appears on about every tenth page, and sometimes even completely drunk. Therefore, in order to avoid any unpleasantness, it will definitely be better to refer to the department in question only as a certain department. So, in a certain department there was a certain official. Not a very remarkable one, it must be said: short in stature, slightly pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, a little shortsighted even, with a rather bald forehead, wrinkles on both cheeks, and a complexion of the kind known as sanguine… No help for it! the St. Petersburg climate was responsible for this. As for his official rank (for with us Russians official rank must be announced first of all), he was what is usually known as a perpetual titular councillor, at which, as is well known, some writers poke fun, and crack jokes to their hearts’ content, upholding the timehonoured tradition of tormenting those who cannot defend themselves. The clerk’s family name was Bashmachkin. It is clear from the name itself that at some point it derived from “bashmak”, which means “shoe” but when, at what time, and in what manner it descended from “bashmak”, none of this is known. Both his father and grandfather, and even his brother-in-law and indeed all the Bashmachkins always wore boots, which only had new soles thrice a year. His name was Akakiy Akakievich. This name may strike the reader as somewhat peculiar and whimsical, but they may rest assured that it was by no means chosen on a whim and that the circumstances were such that it would have been impossible to give him any other name, and this is precisely how it came about. Akakiy Akakievich was born, if my memory fails me not, late on the eve of the 23rd of March. His late mother, the wife of an official, and a very good woman, made all due arrangements for having the child baptised. She was lying on the bed opposite the door while the godfather, a most estimable man, Ivan Ivanovich Yeroshkin, who served as presiding officer of the senate, and the godmother, the wife of a neighbourhood officer and a woman of rare virtues, Arina Semyonovna Byelobryushkova, stood on her right. They offered the mother her choice of three names: Mokiya, Sessiya, or that the child be named after the martyr Khozdazat. “No,” thought the woman, “all those names are outlandish.” In order to please her they opened the calendar to another place. Three more names appeared: Triphiliy, Dula, and Varakhasiy. “What did I do to deserve this?” said the old woman. “What names! I truly never heard the like. It would be okay if Varadat or Baruch were there, but Triphiliy and Varakhasiy!” They turned to another page and found Pavsikakhiy and Vakhtisiy. “Well, now I see,” said the old woman, “that this is evidently his fate. And since this is the case, he’d better be named after his father. The father’s name was Akakiy, so let the son’s be Akakiy too.” This is how Akakiy Akakievich came about. The child was baptised, at which he wept and made such a face, as though he predicted that he was to become a titular councillor. So in this manner did it all happen. We have recounted all this so that the reader might see for themselves that it happened completely out of necessity, and that it was in no way possible to give him any other name. When and how he started at the department, and who appointed him, no one could recall. No matter how many directors and managers of all kinds changed, he was always to be seen in the same position, still in the same post as clerk, so that afterwards everyone was convinced that he must have been born completely ready-made, in a uniform and with a bald patch on his head. There was absolutely no respect shown to Akakiy Akakievich by anybody who worked in the department. Not only did the watchmen fail to rise from their seats when he passed, but they did not even glance at him, as if a mere fly had flown through the reception room. His superiors dealt with him in a somewhat cool and despotic manner. Some assistant to a head of department would shove papers straight under his nose without so much as saying, “Copy this,” or “Here’s a nice interesting one,” or something polite to that tune as one does in well-mannered departments. And he took it, examining only the document without looking to see who had foisted it on him, or whether they had the right to do so. He just took it, and straight away set about copying it. His young colleagues teased and made fun of him, so far as their clerical wit allowed; they told in his presence various stories they had made up about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy; they said that she beat him and enquired of him when their wedding would take place and showered pieces of paper over his head, saying they were snow. But Akakiy Akakievich did not utter a word in response to this, seemingly oblivious to anybody’s presence. It did not even have any effect on his work: amid all these persistent distractions, he made not a single error while copying. Only if the jokes grew exceedingly intolerable, like when they jogged his hand and prevented him from doing his work, would he say, “Do leave me alone, what are you always bothering me for?” And there was something odd in the words and the voice with which they were uttered. There was something pitiful in it, such that one young, recently-appointed clerk, who, following the example set by the others, had allowed himself to laugh at him, just stopped all of a sudden, as though transfixed, like from that moment everything had transformed around him and appeared in a new way. Some curious force drew him away from the comrades whose acquaintance he had made, having mistaken them for decent and well-bred men. Long afterwards, in his cheeriest moments, the memory would come back to him of the little clerk with a balding brow, uttering the words that never left him: “Do leave me alone, what are you always bothering me for?” And behind those words, others rang out — “I am thy brother.” And the poor young man would cover his face with his hands, and many times later in his life he would shudder to see how much inhumanity there was in humans, how much savage barbarism was hidden beneath refined and intelligent respectability, even, God! in those whom everyone regarded as noble and honest…

It would be difficult to find another person anywhere who could live like Akakiy Akakievich in his occupation. It is not enough to say he did his work with zeal: no, he did it with love. There, in that copying, he saw some kind of rich and engaging world of his own. The delight was reflected on his face; some letters were his favourites, such that if he arrived at them, he was beside himself. He smiled, and twinkled, and helped them along with his lips, until it seemed as though one might read each letter in his face as his pen traced it out. Had he been rewarded in accordance with his enthusiasm, he might, to his own great amazement, even have been made a State Councillor; but he earned only, as his witty companions put it, a buckle in his buttonhole with piles to boot, and that was all. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that he received no attention at all. One director, being a kindly man and wishing to reward him for his long service, gave orders that he be given something more important than mere copying. He was tasked with drawing up some kind of letter to another department regarding an already-completed affair; the work consisted simply of changing the heading and altering some verbs here and there from the first person into the third. He found this so laborious that he broke into a sweat all over, rubbed his forehead, and finally said, “No, you’d better let me copy something.” After that, he was left forevermore to his copying. Nothing appeared to exist for him outside this copying. He did not think one bit about his clothes: his uniform, which had originally been green in colour, had developed a kind of faded reddish hue. The collar was narrow and low so that his neck, despite not being very long, seemed exorbitantly so as it emerged from it, like the necks of those plaster kittens with movable heads which foreign pedlars carry about by the dozen on trays put on their heads. And there was always something stuck to his uniform: either a bit of straw or some piece of thread. Moreover, while walking along the street he was very prone to arriving beneath some window just as all sorts of rubbish were being thrown out of it, and therefore he constantly carried off scraps of melon or watermelon rinds or similar kinds of refuse on his hat. Never once in his life did he pay attention to what was going on or happening every day in the street, whereas in contrast, as is very well known, his young fellow clerks would always cast their bold glances as far as they could until they might catch sight of someone’s trouser stirrup coming undone on the opposite side of the road which always brought malicious smiles to their pretty and fresh faces.

But even if Akakiy Akakievich did look at something he saw in all things his clean lines in even handwriting, and only when, out of nowhere a horse settled its muzzle on his shoulder and blew a whole gust of wind down his cheek from its nostrils, did he observe that he was not in the middle of a written line, but rather in the middle of the street. On arriving home, he would sit down at once at the table, hastily sip his cabbage soup and eat a bit of beef with onions, never noticing their taste, swallowing with it all the flies and anything else the Lord happened to send. Noticing his stomach was full, he would get up from the table, take out a jar of ink, and copy papers which he had brought home. If there happened to be none, he would take away a copy deliberately for his own gratification, especially if the document was noteworthy, not on account of the beauty of its style, but of its being addressed to some new or distinguished person.

Even in those hours when St. Petersburg’s grey skies had darkened completely and all the bureaucratic people had eaten and dined, each as best as he could in accordance with his salary and his own whim, when all were resting from the departmental creak of quills, and scurrying, from their own and others’ immutable activities, and from all the duties a restless man takes on voluntarily, rather more than necessary even, and when officials are in a hurry to devote their remaining time to enjoyable activities: the bolder official rushes to the theatre; another goes out to spend his time gazing at some hats; and someone hurries to a party to pay compliments to some sweet girl, the star of a small bureaucratic circle; still another, and this happens most often, just goes to his fellow clerk’s on some fourth or third floor, to two small rooms with a hall or a kitchen and some fashionable knick-knacks, a lamp or some other little thing that signified many sacrifices and dinners and festivities declined — in short, even when all the officials were scattering among the apartments of their friends playing a ruthless game of whist, sipping tea from glasses with penny biscuits, and inhaling smoke from long pipes, or, during their turn to deal cards sharing gossip passed along from high society, which a Russian person can never under any circumstances turn their nose up at, or even, when there is nothing to talk about, retelling the timeless joke about the commandant who was brought word that the tail of the horse in Falconet monument* had been cut off — in short, even when everything in the world tried to have fun Akakiy Akakievich did not indulge himself in any kind of enter-tainment. No one could ever say that he had seen him at any kind of evening party. Having written to his heart’s content, he would go to bed, looking forward with a smile to the thought of the next day, and wondering what God might send him to copy on the morrow. This is how the man’s peaceful life proceeded: a man who, with a salary of four hundred roubles, knew how to be satisfied with his lot and would perhaps have reached a ripe old age had various disasters not been strewn along life’s path for titular councillors as well as for private, actual, court, and every other species of councillor and even for those who never gave anybody any advice or took any from anybody themselves.

There exists in St. Petersburg a powerful adversary of all those who draw a salary of four hundred roubles a year or thereabouts. This adversary is none other than the Northern frost, though, on the other hand, it is said to be very good for the health. At nine o’clock in the morning, just when the streets are filled with clerks off to their various departments, it begins to dole out such powerful and bitter nips on all noses indiscriminately that the poor officials really do not know where to find shelter from them. At this time, when the foreheads of even high-ranking officials are aching from the cold and tears spring to their eyes, the poor titular councillors are sometimes quite unprotected. Their only salvation lies in running as quickly as possible, in a threadbare coat, down five or six streets, and then in the porter’s room stomping their feet thoroughly to warm them, until all the abilities and talents needed for official duties, which have become frozen on the way, are thawed. Akakiy Akakievich had begun to feel for some time that his back and shoulder were affected particularly badly, in spite of the fact that he tried to run the given distance as quickly as possible. He finally wondered whether his coat might be to blame. Having examined it thoroughly at home he discovered that in two or three places, namely the back and shoulders it had become like cheesecloth: the fabric had been worn out to such a degree that it was see-through, and the lining was falling apart. It is necessary to know that Akakiy Akakievich’s coat also served as a target of ridicule among the officials; they even took the noble name of coat from it and called it a cowl. It is quite true that it was of remarkable design: its collar had been growing smaller and smaller from year to year, for it served to repair the coat’s other parts. These repairs did not exhibit great skill on the part of the tailor and turned out, each time, baggy and ugly. Having seen what the trouble was, Akakiy Akakievich decided that the coat must be taken down to Petrovich, a tailor who lived somewhere on the fourth floor up a back staircase, and who, regardless of his being blind in one eye and having pockmarks all over his face, was quite a successful tailor when it came to repairing the trousers and tail-coats of bureaucrats and other kinds of people — while he was sober and was not dwelling on any other affairs, that is. We wouldn’t spend too much time talking about this tailor of course, but since it’s the established custom that the disposition of every character in a tale be made clear there is nothing to be done: here is Petrovich. At first he was simply called Grigory and was the serf of some nobleman; he started going by Petrovich when he received his emancipation papers, and from then he began to drink quite heavily on all sorts of holidays, at first on big ones, and then indiscriminately, on all church festivities, wherever there was a cross on the calendar. In this respect, he was faithful to his ancestors’ customs and, while arguing with his wife, called her a laywoman and a German. Since his wife has been mentioned, it’s necessary to say a word or two about her but unfortunately not very much was known of her beyond the fact that Petrovich had a wife, who did not wear a shawl but a cap instead; but as it would seem she could not boast of her beauty; at least, nobody except the soldiers of the guard peered with interest under her cap to look upon her face when they met her in the street, twirling their moustaches and emitting some peculiar noise.

Climbing the stairs which led to Petrovich’s dwelling, which, to do them justice, were all soaked with water and swill, and reeked with that spirituous smell which stings the eyes and, as everybody knows very well, is inevitably found in all the back staircases in St. Petersburg houses — climbing the stairs, Akakiy Akakievich was already mulling over how much Petrovich could probably ask, and silently resolved not to give him more than two roubles. The door stood open because the lady of the house, while cooking some fish, had generated so much smoke in the kitchen that even the very cockroaches had vanished from sight. Akakiy Akakievich walked through the kitchen, beyond the notice of the hostess herself even, and finally entered a room where he saw Petrovich sitting on a wide, unpainted wooden table, with his legs tucked under him like a Turkish pasha. Petrovich’s feet, in accordance with the custom of tailors sitting at their work, were bare. And the first thing which drew attention was his thumb, very familiar to Akakiy Akakievich, with its somehow mis-shapen nail, thick