The Collected tales of Nikolai Gogol

Chartkov became a fashionable painter in all respects. He began going to dinners, accompanied ladies to galleries and even to fetes, dressed elegantly, and openly affirmed that an artist must belong to society, that his estate must be upheld, that artists dressed like cobblers, did not know how to behave, did not keep up a high tone, and were totally lacking in cultivation. At home, in his studio, he became accustomed to great neatness and cleanliness, hired two magnificent lackeys, acquired elegant pupils, changed several times a day into various morning suits, had his hair curled, busied himself with improving all the manners by which to receive clients, with the beautifying of his appearance by every means possible, so as to make a pleasing impression on the ladies; in short, it was soon quite impossible to recognize in him that modest artist who had once worked inconspicuously in his hovel on Vasilievsky Island. He now spoke sharply of painters and of art: he maintained that too much merit was granted to painters of the past, that prior to Raphael they had all painted not figures but herrings; that the notion that some sort of holiness could be seen in them existed only in the imagination of the viewers; that even Raphael himself had not always painted well and many of his works were famous only by tradition; that Michelangelo was a braggart, because he only wanted to show off his knowledge of anatomy, that there was no gracefulness in him at all, and that true brilliance, power of the brush and of colors should be looked for only now, in the present age. Here, naturally, things would turn inadvertently to himself.

"No, I do not understand," he would say, "why others strain so much, sitting and toiling over their work. The man who potters for several months over a painting is, in my opinion, a laborer, not an artist. I don't believe there is any talent in him. A genius creates boldly, quickly. Here," he would say, usually turning to his visitors, "this portrait I painted in two days, this little head in one day, this in a few hours, this in a little more than an hour. No, I… I confess, I do not recognize as art something assembled line by line. That is craft, not art."

So he spoke to his visitors, and the visitors marveled at the power and facility of his brush, even uttered exclamations on hearing how quickly he worked, and then said to each other: "That's talent, true talent! See how he speaks, how his eyes shine! Il y a quelque chose d'extraordinaire dans toute sa figure!"

The artist was flattered to hear such rumors about himself. When printed praise of him appeared in the magazines, he was happy as a child, though this praise had been bought for him with his own money. He carried the printed page around everywhere and, as if inadvertently, showed it to his friends and acquaintances, and this delighted him to the point of the most simple-hearted naivety. His fame grew, his work and commissions increased. He was already tired of the same portraits and faces, whose poses and attitudes he knew by rote. He painted them now without much enthusiasm, applying himself to sketching only the head anyhow and leaving the rest for his pupils to finish. Before, he had still sought to give some new pose, to impress with force, with effects. Now that, too, became boring to him. His mind was growing weary of thinking up and thinking out. It was more than he could stand, and he had no time: a distracted life and the society in which he tried to play the role of a worldly man-all this took him far from work and thought. His brush was becoming cold and dull, and he imperceptibly locked himself into monotonous, predetermined, long worn-out forms. The monotonous, cold, eternally tidied and, so to speak, buttoned-up faces of the officials, military and civil, did not offer much space for the brush: it began to forget luxurious draperies, strong gestures and passions. To say nothing of group composition, of artistic drama and its lofty design. Before him sat only a uniform, a bodice, a tailcoat, before which an artist feels chilled and all imagination collapses. Even the most ordinary merits were no longer to be seen in his productions, and yet they still went on being famous, though true connoisseurs and artists merely shrugged as they looked at his latest works. And some who had known Chartkov before could not understand how the talent of which signs had shown clearly in him at the very beginning could have disappeared, and vainly tried to understand how the gift could die out in a man just as he reached the full development of his powers.

But the intoxicated artist did not hear this talk. He was already beginning to reach the age of maturity in mind and years, had already begun to gain weight and expand visibly in girth. In newspapers and magazines he was already reading the adjectives "our esteemed Andrei Petrovich," "our honored Andrei Petrovich." He was already being offered respectable posts in the civil service, invited to examinations and committees. He was already beginning, as always happens at a respectable age, to take a firm stand for Raphael and the old masters-not because he was fully convinced of their lofty merit, but so as to shove them in the faces of young artists. He was already beginning, as is the custom of all those entering that age, to reproach the young without exception for immorality and a wrong turn of mind. He was already beginning to believe that everything in the world is done simply, that there is no inspiration from above, and everything must inevitably be subjected to one strict order of accuracy and uniformity. In short, his life had already touched upon the age when everything that breathes of impulse shrinks in a man, when a powerful bow has a fainter effect on his soul and no longer twines piercing music around his heart, when the touch of beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burnt-out feelings become more accessible to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little allow it imperceptibly to lull them completely. Fame cannot give pleasure to one who did not merit it but stole it; it produces a constant tremor only in one who is worthy of it. And therefore all his feelings and longings turned toward gold. Gold became his passion, his ideal, fear, delight, purpose. Bundles of banknotes grew in his coffers, and he, like everyone else to whom this terrible gift is granted, began to be a bore, inaccessible to anything but gold, a needless miser, a purposeless hoarder, and was about to turn into one of those strange beings who are so numerous in our unfeeling world, at whom a man filled with life and heart looks with horror, who seem to him like moving stone coffins with dead men instead of hearts in them. Yet one event shook him deeply and awakened all his living constitution.

One day he found a note on his desk in which the Academy of

Art asked him as a worthy member to come and give his opinion of a new work sent from Italy by a Russian artist who was studying there. This artist was one of his former comrades, who from a young age had borne within himself a passion for art, and with the ardent spirit of a laborer had immersed himself in it with his whole soul, had torn himself away from friends, from family, from cherished habits, and rushed to where under beautiful skies a majestic hothouse of the arts was ripening-to that wonderful Rome, at the name of which the ardent heart of an artist beats so deeply and strongly. There, like a hermit, he immersed himself in work and totally undistracted studies. He was not concerned if people commented on his character, his inability to deal with people, his nonobservance of worldly proprieties, the humiliation he inflicted upon the estate of artists by his poor, unfashionable dress. He could not have cared less whether his brethren were angry with him or not. He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings. He did not enter into noisy discussions and disputes; he stood neither for nor against the purists. He granted its due share to everything equally, drawing from everything only what was beautiful in it, and in the end left himself only the divine Raphael as a teacher. So a great poetic artist, having read many different writings filled with much delight and majestic beauty, in the end might leave himself, as his daily reading, only Homer's Iliad, having discovered that in it there is everything one wants, and there is nothing that has not already been reflected in its profound and great perfection. And he came away from this schooling with a majestic idea of creation, a powerful beauty of thought, the lofty delight of a heavenly brush.

On entering the hall, Chartkov found a huge crowd of visitors already gathered before the painting. A profound silence, such as rarely occurs amidst a gathering of connoisseurs, now reigned everywhere. He hastened to assume the significant physiognomy of an expert and approached the painting-but, God, what did he see!

Pure, immaculate, beautiful as a bride, the artist's creation stood before him. Modest, divine, innocent, and simple as genius, it soared above everything. It seemed that the heavenly figures, astonished to have so many eyes directed at them, shyly lowered their beautiful eyelashes. With a sense of involuntary amazement, the experts contemplated this new, unprecedented brush. Here everything seemed to have come together: the study of Raphael, reflected in the lofty nobility of the poses; the study of Correggio, breathing from the ultimate perfection of the brushwork. But most imperiously of all there was manifest the power of creation already contained in the soul of the artist himself. Every least object in the picture was pervaded with it; law and inner force were grasped in everything. Everywhere that flowing roundedness of line had been grasped which belongs to nature and is seen only by the eyes of the creative artist, and which comes out angular in an imitator. One could see how the artist had first taken into his soul everything he had drawn from the external world, and from there, from the spring of his soul, had sent it forth in one harmonious, triumphant song. And it became clear even to the uninitiate what a measureless abyss separates a creation from a mere copy of nature. It is almost impossible to express the extraordinary silence that came over everyone whose eyes were fixed on the painting- not a rustle, not a sound; and the painting meanwhile appeared loftier and loftier with every minute; brightly and wonderfully it detached itself from everything, and all transformed finally into one instant-the fruit of a thought that had flown down to the artist from heaven-an instant for which the whole of human life is only a preparation. Involuntary tears were ready to flow down the faces of the visitors who surrounded the picture. It seemed that all tastes and all brazen or wrongheaded deviations of taste merged into some silent hymn to the divine work. Chartkov stood motionless, openmouthed before the picture, and at last, when the visitors and experts gradually began to stir and to discuss the merits of the work, and when at last they turned to him with the request that he tell them what he thought, he came to himself; he was about to assume an indifferent, habitual air, was about to produce the banal, habitual judgment of a jaded artist, something like: "Yes, of course, it's true, one can't deny the artist a certain talent; there's something there; one can see he wanted to express something; but as for the essence…" And to follow it, naturally, with such praise as no artist would be the better for. He was about to do that, but the words died on his lips, tears and sobs burst out in a discordant response, and like a madman he rushed from the hall.

For a moment he stood motionless and insensible in the middle of his magnificent studio. His whole being, his whole life was awakened in one instant, as if youth returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent blazed up again. The blindfold suddenly fell from his eyes. God! to ruin the best years of his youth so mercilessly; to destroy, to extinguish the spark of fire that had perhaps flickered in his breast, that perhaps would have developed by now into greatness and beauty, that perhaps would also have elicited tears of amazement and gratitude! And to ruin all that, to ruin it without any mercy! It seemed to him as if those urges and impulses that used to be familiar to him suddenly revived all at once in his soul. He seized a brush and approached the canvas. The sweat of effort stood out on his face; he was all one desire, burning with one thought: he wanted to portray a fallen angel. This idea corresponded most of all to his state of mind. But, alas! his figures, poses, groupings, thoughts came out forced and incoherent. His brush and imagination were confined too much to one measure, and the powerless impulse to overstep the limits and fetters he had imposed on himself now tasted of wrongness and error. He had neglected the long, wearisome ladder of gradual learning and the first basic laws of future greatness. Vexation pervaded him. He ordered all his latest works, all the lifeless, fashionable pictures, all the portraits of hussars, ladies, and state councillors, taken out of the studio. Locked up in the room by himself, he ordered that no one be admitted and immersed himself entirely in his work. Like a patient youth, like an apprentice, he sat over his task. But how mercilessly ungrateful was everything that came from under his brush! At every step he was pulled up short by want of knowledge of the most basic elements; a simple, insignificant mechanism chilled his whole impulse and stood as an insuperable threshold for his imagination. The brush turned involuntarily to forms learned by rote, the arms got folded in one studied manner, the head dared not make any unusual turn, even the very folds of the clothing smacked of rote learning and refused to obey and be draped over an unfamiliar pose of the body. And he felt it, he felt it and saw it himself!

"But did I ever really have talent?" he said finally "Am I not mistaken?" And as he said these words, he went up to his old works, which had once been painted so purely, so disinterestedly, there in the poor hovel on solitary Vasilievsky Island, far from people, abundance, and all sorts of fancies. He went up to them now and began to study them all attentively, and along with them all his former poor life began to emerge in his memory. "Yes," he said desperately, "I did have talent. Everywhere, on everything, I can see signs and traces of it…"

He stopped and suddenly shook all over: his eyes met with eyes fixed motionlessly on him. It was that extraordinary portrait he had bought in the Shchukin market. All this time it had been covered up, blocked by other paintings, and had left his mind completely. But now, as if by design, when all the fashionable portraits and pictures that had filled the studio were gone, it surfaced together with the old works of his youth. When he remembered all its strange story, remembered that in some sense it, this strange portrait, had been the cause of his transformation, that the hidden treasure he had obtained in such a miraculous way had given birth to all the vain impulses in him which had ruined his talent-rage nearly burst into his soul. That same moment he ordered the hateful portrait taken out. But that did not calm his inner agitation: all his feelings and all his being were shaken to their depths, and he came to know that terrible torment which, by way of a striking exception, sometimes occurs in nature, when a weak talent strains to show itself on too grand a scale and fails; that torment which gives birth to great things in a youth, but, in passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning; that dreadful torment which makes a man capable of terrible evildoing. A terrible envy possessed him, an envy bordering on rage. The bile rose in him when he saw some work that bore the stamp of talent. He ground his teeth and devoured it with the eyes of a basilisk. 14 A plan was born in his soul, the most infernal a man ever nursed, and with furious force he rushed to carry it out. He began to buy up all the best that art produced. Having bought a painting for a high price, he would take it carefully to his room, fall upon it with the fury of a tiger, tear it, shred it, cut it to pieces, and trample it with his feet, all the while laughing with delight. The inestimable wealth he had acquired provided him with the means of satisfying this infernal desire. He untied all his bags of gold and opened his coffers. No monster of ignorance ever destroyed so many beautiful works as did this fierce avenger. Whenever he appeared at an auction, everyone despaired beforehand of acquiring a work of art. It seemed as if a wrathful heaven had sent this terrible scourge into the world on purpose, wishing to deprive it of all harmony. This terrible passion lent him some frightful coloration: his face was eternally bilious. Denial and blasphemy against the world were expressed in his features. He seemed the incarnation of that terrible demon whom Pushkin had portrayed ideally. 15 His lips uttered nothing but venomous words and eternal despite. Like some sort of harpy, he would appear in the street and even his acquaintances, spotting him from far off, would try to dodge and avoid the encounter, saying it was enough to poison all the rest of the day.

Fortunately for the world and for the arts, such a strained and violent life could not long continue: the scope of its passions was too exaggerated and colossal for its feeble forces. Attacks of rage and madness began to come more often, and finally it all turned into a most terrible illness. A cruel fever combined with galloping consumption came over him with such fierceness that in three days nothing but a shadow of him remained. This was combined with all the signs of hopeless insanity. Sometimes several men could not hold him back. He would begin to imagine the long forgotten, living eyes of the extraordinary portrait, and then his rage was terrible. All the people around his bed seemed to him like terrible portraits. It doubled, quadrupled in his eyes; all the walls seemed hung with portraits, their motionless, living eyes fixed on him. Frightful portraits stared from the ceiling, from the floor; the room expanded and went on endlessly to make space for more of these motionless eyes. The doctor who had assumed the charge of caring for him, having heard something of his strange story, tried his best to find the mysterious relation between the phantoms he imagined and the circumstances of his life, but never succeeded. The sick man neither understood nor felt anything except his own torments, and uttered only terrible screams and incoherent talk. Finally his life broke off in the last, already voiceless strain of suffering. His corpse was frightful. Nothing could be found of his enormous wealth, either; but seeing the slashed remains of lofty works of art whose worth went beyond millions, its terrible use became clear.

PART II

A great many carriages, droshkies, and barouches stood outside the entrance of a house in which an auction was under way of the belongings of one of those wealthy lovers of art who spend their whole life drowsing sweetly, immersed in their zephyrs and cupids, who innocently pass for Maecenases 16 and simple-heartedly spend on it the millions accumulated by their substantial fathers, and often even by their own former labors. Such Maecenases, as we know, exist no longer, and our nineteenth century has long since acquired the dull physiognomy of a banker who delights in his millions only as numbers on paper. The long room was filled with a most motley crowd of visitors, who had come flying like birds of prey to an unburied body. There was a whole fleet of Russian merchants from the Merchants' Arcade, 17 and even from the flea market, in dark blue German frock coats. Their appearance and the expression of their faces was somehow more firm here, more free, and not marked by that cloying subservience so conspicuous in the Russian merchant when he is in his shop with a customer before him. Here they dropped all decorum, even though there were in this same hall a great many of those counts before whom, in some other place, they would be ready with their bowing to sweep away the dust brought in on their own boots. Here they were completely casual, unceremoniously fingered the books and paintings, wishing to see if the wares were good, and boldly upped the bids offered by aristocratic experts. Here there were many of those inevitable auction-goers whose custom it was to attend one every day in place of lunch; aristocratic experts who considered it their duty not to miss a chance of adding to their collections and who found nothing else to do between twelve and one; and, lastly, those noble gentlemen whose clothes and pockets were quite threadbare, who came daily with no mercenary purpose but solely to see how it would end, who would offer more, who less, who would bid up whom, and who would be left with what. A great many paintings were thrown around without any sense at all; they were mixed in with furniture and books bearing the monogram of their former owner, who probably never had the laudable curiosity to look into them. Chinese vases, marble table tops, new and old pieces of furniture with curved lines, gryphons, sphinxes, and lions' paws, gilded and ungilded, chandeliers, Quinquet lamps 18 - it was all lying in heaps, and by no means in the orderly fashion of shops. It all presented some sort of chaos of the arts. Generally, we experience a dreadful feeling at the sight of an auction: it all smacks of something like a funeral procession. The rooms in which they are held are always somehow gloomy; the windows, blocked by furniture and paintings, emit a scant light, silence spreads over the faces, and the funereal voice of the auctioneer, as he taps with his hammer, intones a panikhida 19 over the poor arts so oddly come together there. All this seems to strengthen still more the strange unpleasantness of the impression.

The auction seemed to be at its peak. A whole crowd of decent people, clustered together, vied excitedly with each other over something. The words "Rouble, rouble, rouble," coming from all sides, gave the auctioneer no time to repeat the rising price, which had already grown four times over the initial one. The surrounding crowd was excited over a portrait that could not have failed to stop anyone with at least some understanding of painting. The lofty brush of an artist was clearly manifest in it. The portrait had evidently already been renewed and restored several times, and it represented the swarthy features of some Asian in loose attire, with an extraordinary, strange expression on his face; but most of all, the people around it were struck by the extraordinary aliveness of the eyes. The more they looked at them, the more the eyes seemed to penetrate into each of them. This strangeness, this extraordinary trick of the artist, occupied almost everyone's attention. Many of the competitors had already given up, because the bids rose incredibly. There remained only two well-known aristocrats, lovers of painting, who simply refused to give up such an acquisition. They were excited and would probably have raised the bid impossibly, if one of the onlookers there had not suddenly said:

"Allow me to interrupt your dispute for a time. I have perhaps more right to this portrait than anyone else."

These words instantly drew everyone's attention to him. He was a trim man of about thirty-five with long black hair. His pleasant face, filled with some carefree brightness, spoke for a soul foreign to all wearisome worldly shocks; in his clothing there was no pretense to fashion: everything in him spoke of the artist. This was, in fact, the painter B., known personally to many of those present.

"Strange as my words may seem to you," he went on, seeing the general attention directed at him, "if you are resolved to listen to a brief story, you will perhaps see that I had the right to speak them. Everything assures me that this portrait is the very one I am looking for."

A quite natural curiosity lit up on the faces of almost all of them, and the auctioneer himself stopped, openmouthed, with the upraised hammer in his hand, preparing to listen. At the beginning of the story, many kept involuntarily turning their eyes to the portrait, but soon they all fixed their eyes on the narrator alone, as his story became ever more engrossing.

"You know that part of the city which is called Kolomna." So he began. "There everything is unlike the other parts of Petersburg; there it is neither capital nor province; you seem to feel, as you enter the streets of Kolomna, that all youthful desires and impulses are abandoning you. The future does not visit there, everything there is silence and retirement; everything has settled out of the movement of the capital. Retired clerks move there to live, and widows, and people of small income who, after some acquaintance with the Senate, 20 condemned themselves to this place for almost their whole lives; pensioned-off cooks who spend all day jostling in the marketplaces, babbling nonsense with some peasant in a small-goods shop, and every day take five kopecks' worth of coffee and four of sugar; and, finally, that whole class of people who may be called by one word: ashen-people whose clothing, faces, hair, eyes have a sort of dull, ashen appearance, like a day on which there is neither storm nor sun in the sky, but simply nothing in particular: a drizzling mist robs all objects of their sharpness. Retired theater ushers, retired titular councillors, retired disciples of Mars with a blind eye and a swollen lip, can be included here. These people are utterly passionless: they walk about without looking at anything, they are silent without thinking about anything. They have few chattels in their rooms, sometimes simply a bottle of pure Russian vodka, which they sip monotonously all day, without any strong rush to the head aroused by a heavy intake such as a young German artisan likes to treat himself to on Sundays-that daredevil of Meshchanskaya Street, who takes sole possession of the pavements once it's past midnight.

"Life in Kolomna is terribly solitary: there is rarely a carriage, except maybe the kind actors go around in, which with its rumbling, jingling, and clanking is all that disturbs the universal silence. There everybody goes on foot; a cabby with no passengers quite often plods along, bringing hay to his bearded little nag. You can find lodgings for five roubles a month, even with morning coffee. Widows living on pensions are the aristocrats of the place-they behave themselves well, sweep their room frequently, discuss the high price of beef and cabbage with their lady friends; there's often a young daughter with them, a silent, speechless, sometimes comely being, a vile little dog, and a wall clock with a sadly ticking pendulum. Then come actors, whose earnings do not allow them to move out of Kolomna-free folk who, like all artists, live for pleasure. Sitting in their dressing gowns, they repair a pistol, glue up various useful household objects from cardboard, play checkers or cards with a visiting friend, spend the morning that way, and do almost the same thing in the evening, with the addition of an occasional glass of punch. After these aces and the aristocracy of Kolomna come the extraordinarily puny and piddling. It's as difficult to name them as it is to count the multitude of insects that generate in stale vinegar. There are old women who pray, old women who drink, old women who both pray and drink, old women who get along by incomprehensible means, like ants- they drag old rags and linens from the Kalinkin Bridge to the flea market and sell them there for fifteen kopecks; in short, often the most wretched sediment of mankind, whose condition no philanthropic political economist could find the means to improve.

"I mention them in order to show you how often these people have the need to seek one-time, sudden, temporary assistance, to resort to borrowing; and then there settle among them a special sort of moneylenders, who provide them with small sums on a pledge and at high interest. These small moneylenders are oftentimes more unfeeling than any of the big ones, because they emerge in the midst of poverty and the most manifest beggarly rags, something not seen by the wealthy moneylender, who deals only with those who come to him in carriages. And therefore human feeling dies all too early in their souls. Among these moneylenders there was one… but it will do no harm to inform you that the event I've begun to tell you about took place in the last century-namely, during the reign of the late empress Catherine II. You can understand yourselves that the very appearance and inner life of Kolomna must have changed significantly And so, among the moneylenders there was one-an extraordinary being in all respects-who had long since settled in that part of the city. He went about in loose Asian attire; the dark color of his face pointed to his southern origin, but precisely what his nationality was-Indian, Greek, Persian-no one could say for certain. Tall, almost extraordinary stature, a swarthy, lean, burnt face, its color somehow inconceivably terrible, large eyes of an extraordinary fire, and thick, beetling brows, distinguished him greatly and sharply from all the ashen inhabitants of the capital. His dwelling itself was unlike all the other little wooden houses. It was a stone building, like those once built in great numbers by Genoese merchants-with irregular, unequal-sized windows, iron shutters, and iron bars. This moneylender differed from other moneylenders in that he was able to supply any sum to anyone, from a destitute old woman to an extravagant courtier. The most brilliant carriages often turned up in front of his house, in the windows of which the heads of magnificent society ladies often appeared. The rumor spread, as usual, that his iron coffers were filled with an inestimable fortune in money, jewelry, diamonds, and various pledges, but that nonetheless he was not mercenary in the same way other moneylenders were. He gave money out willingly, fixing seemingly advantageous terms of payment; but through certain strange mathematical calculations, he somehow made the interest increase enormously. So, at least, rumor said. But strangest of all, and what could not fail to strike many, was the strange fate that befell all those who took money from him: they all ended their lives in some unfortunate way. Whether this was simply people's opinion, absurd superstitious talk, or a deliberately spread rumor, remained unknown. But within a short period of time several vivid and spectacular examples occurred before everyone's eyes.

"Among the aristocracy of the time, a young man from one of the best families soon drew everyone's eyes, who distinguished himself in the government service while still young-an ardent admirer of everything genuine and lofty, a zealot of everything produced by human art and intellect, a promising Maecenas. He soon deserved to be distinguished by the empress herself, who entrusted him with an important post that agreed perfectly with his own expectations, a post in which he could do much for learning and for the good in general. The young courtier surrounded himself with painters, poets, scholars. He wanted to give work to all, to encourage all. He undertook at his own expense a great many useful publications, commissioned a great many things, announced encouraging awards, spent heaps of money on it, and in the end was ruined. Yet, full of magnanimous impulse, he did not want to abandon his cause, sought to borrow everywhere, and turned at last to the famous moneylender. Having taken a considerable loan from him, in a short period of time the man changed completely: he became an enemy, a persecutor of developing minds and talents. In all writings he began to see the bad side, he twisted the meaning of every phrase. As luck would have it, the French Revolution occurred just then. This suddenly served him as a tool for every possible nastiness. He began to see some sort of revolutionary trend in everything, he imagined allusions everywhere. He became suspicious to such a degree that he finally began to suspect his own self, started writing terrible, unjust denunciations, made innumerable people miserable. It goes without saying that such behavior could not fail in the end to reach the throne. The magnanimous empress was horrified and, filled with that nobility of soul which is the adornment of crowned heads, spoke words which, though they could not have been conveyed to us exactly, yet imprinted their deep meaning in the hearts of many. The empress observed that it is not under monarchy that the lofty, noble impulses of the soul are suppressed, it is not there that works of intellect, poetry, and art are scorned and persecuted; that, on the contrary, only monarchs patronize them; that the Shakespeares and Molieres flourished under their magnanimous rule, while Dante could not find himself a corner in his republican fatherland; that true geniuses emerge in times of the splendor and power of sovereigns and states, and not at times of outrageous political phenomena and republican terrors, which up to now have never presented the world with a single poet; that poets and artists ought to be held in distinction, for they bring only peace and a beautiful quiet to the soul, not agitation and murmuring; that scholars, poets, and all those who produce art are pearls and diamonds in the imperial crown: by them the epoch of a great sovereign is adorned and acquires still greater splendor. In short, the empress, at the moment of speaking these words, was divinely beautiful. I remember that old people couldn't speak of it without tears. Everyone became concerned with the affair. To the credit of our national pride, it must be noted that there always dwells in the Russian heart a beautiful impulse to take the side of the oppressed. The courtier who had betrayed his trust was duly punished and dismissed from his post. But in the faces of his compatriots he read a much greater punishment. This was a decided and universal scorn. It is impossible to describe how the vain soul suffered; pride, disap- pointed ambition, ruined hopes all joined together, and in fits of terrible madness and rage his life broke off.

"Another spectacular example also occurred before everyone's eyes. Among the beauties of whom there was no lack in our northern capital, one decidedly held primacy over the rest. She was some miraculous blend of our northern beauty with Mediterranean beauty, a diamond that rarely occurs in the world. My father used to confess that he had never in his life seen anything like her. It seemed that everything came together in her: wealth, intelligence, and inner charm. She had a crowd of wooers, and the most remarkable of them was Prince R., the noblest, the best of all young men, beautiful both in looks and in his chivalrous, magnanimous impulses-the lofty ideal of novels and women, a Gran-dison 21 in all respects. Prince R. was passionately and madly in love with her; and he was reciprocated with the same burning love. But her family thought the match unequal. The prince's hereditary estates had long ceased to belong to him, his family was in disgrace, and the poor state of his affairs was known to everyone. Suddenly the prince leaves the capital for a time, supposedly in order to straighten out his affairs, and a short while later he reappears surrounded with unbelievable magnificence and splendor. Brilliant balls and banquets make him known at court. The beauty's father turns favorable, and in town a most interesting wedding takes place. Whence came such a change and the bridegroom's unheard-of wealth-that certainly no one could explain; but people murmured on the side that he had entered into certain conditions with the incomprehensible moneylender and taken a loan from him. Be that as it may, the wedding occupied the whole town. Both bride and groom were objects of general envy. Everybody knew of their ardent, constant love, the long languishing suffered on both sides, the high merits of both. Fiery women described beforehand the paradisal bliss that the young spouses were going to enjoy. But it all turned out otherwise. Within a year, a terrible change took place in the husband. His character, hitherto noble and beautiful, was poisoned by the venom of suspicious jealousy, intolerance, and inexhaustible caprices. He became a tyrant and tormentor of his wife and-something no one could have foreseen-resorted to the most inhuman acts, even to beating. Within a year, no one could recognize the woman who so recently had shone and attracted crowds of obedient admirers. At last, unable to endure her hard lot any longer, she made the first mention of divorce. Her husband flew into a fury at the very thought of it. On a first violent impulse, he burst into her room with a knife in his hand and undoubtedly would have stabbed her then and there had he not been seized and held back. In a fit of frenzy and despair, he turned the knife against himself-and in the most terrible sufferings ended his life.

"Besides these two examples, which happened before the eyes of the whole of society, a great many were told of which had occurred in the lower classes, almost all of them having a terrible end. Here an honest, sober man became a drunkard; there a merchant's salesclerk stole from his employer; there a cabby, after several years of honest work, put a knife into a client over a penny. It was impossible that these occurrences, sometimes told with additions, should fail to bring some sort of involuntary terror to the humble inhabitants of Kolomna. No one doubted the presence of unclean powers in this man. It was said that he offered hair-raising terms, such as no unfortunate man ever dared repeat to anyone afterwards; that his money had a burning quality, that it became red-hot by itself and bore some strange signs… in short, there was a great deal of every sort of absurd talk. And the remarkable thing was that this whole Kolomna populace, this whole world of poor old women, minor officials, minor artists, and, in short, all the small fry we've just named, agreed to suffer and endure the last extremity rather than turn to the dreadful moneylender; old women were even found dead of starvation, preferring the death of their bodies to the destruction of their souls. Those who met him in the street felt an involuntary fear. A passer-by would cautiously back away and glance behind him for a long time afterwards, watching his immensely tall figure disappear in the distance. His appearance alone held so much of the extraordinary that it would have made anyone ascribe a supernatural existence to him. The strong features, more deeply chiseled than ever happens in a man; the hot, bronze complexion; the immense thickness of the eyebrows, the unbearably frightening eyes, even the loose folds of his Asian clothing-all seemed to say that the passions of others all paled before the passion that moved in his body. My father, each time he met him, would stand motionless, and each time could not help saying: 'The devil, the very devil!' But I must hasten to acquaint you with my father, who, incidentally, is the real subject of this story

"My father was a man remarkable in many respects. He was an artist such as few are, one of those wonders that Russia alone brings forth from her inexhaustible womb, a self-taught artist who found rules and laws in his own soul, without teachers or school, driven only by his thirst for perfection, and following, for reasons perhaps unknown to himself, no path but that which his own soul indicated-one of those natural-born wonders whom contemporaries often abuse with the offensive word 'ignoramus' and whom the castigations of others and their own failures do not cool down but only lend new zeal and strength, so that in their souls they go far beyond the works that earned them the title of 'ignoramus.' With lofty inner instinct, he sensed the presence of a thought in every object; he grasped the true meaning of the term 'historical painting' on his own; grasped why a simple head, a simple portrait by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Correggio, could be called a historical painting, and why a huge picture on a historical subject remained a tableau de genre, despite all the artist's claim to historical painting. Both inner sense and personal conviction turned his brush to Christian subjects, the highest and last step of the sublime. He had none of the ambition or irritability so inseparable from the character of many artists. He was of firm character, an honest, direct, even crude man, covered on the outside with a somewhat tough bark, not without a certain pride in his soul, who spoke of people at once sharply and condescendingly. 'Why look at them?' he used to say. 'I don't work for them. I won't take my works to their drawing rooms, they'll be put in a church. Whoever understands me will be grateful-if not, they'll pray to God anyway. There's no point in blaming a man of society for not understanding painting: he understands cards instead, he can appreciate good wine, horses-why should a gentleman know more than that? Otherwise he'll take up one thing or another, turn smart, and then there'll be no getting rid of him! To each his own; let everybody tend to his affairs. As I see it, he's a better man who says outright that he doesn't understand than one who plays the hypocrite, saying he knows something when he doesn't and simply mucking everything up.' He worked for little money-that is, just for what he needed to support his family and give him the chance to work. Besides that, he never refused to help others or give a helping hand to a poor artist. He had the simple, pious faith of his ancestors, and that may be why the lofty expression which brilliant talents were never able to achieve appeared of itself on the faces he portrayed. In the end, through the constancy of his labors and his steadfastness on the path he had marked out for himself, he began to gain respect even on the part of those who had abused him as an ignoramus and a homemade talent. He was constantly given commissions by the Church and was never without work. One of his works occupied him greatly. I no longer remember what the subject was, I know only that he had to include the spirit of darkness in the picture. He thought for a long time about what image to give him; he wanted to realize in his face all that burdens and oppresses man. As he reflected thus, the image of the mysterious moneylender sometimes passed through his head, and he would think involuntarily, 'There's the one I should paint the devil after.' Consider his astonishment, then, when one day, as he was working in his studio, he heard a knock at the door and immediately afterwards the terrible moneylender came in. He could not help feeling some inner tremor, which passed involuntarily through his whole body.

" 'You are an artist?' he said to my father, without any ceremony.

" 'An artist,' my father said in perplexity, waiting for what would follow.

" 'Very well. Paint my portrait. I may die soon. I have no children, but I do not want to die altogether, I want to live on. Can you paint my portrait as if it were perfectly alive?'

"My father thought, 'What could be better? He's inviting himself to be the devil in my painting.' He gave his word. They arranged the time and the price, and the next day my father seized his palette and brushes and went to him. The high courtyard, the dogs, the iron doors and bars, the arched windows, the coffers covered with strange carpets, and, finally, the extraordinary host himself, who sat motionless before him-all this made a strange impression on him. The windows, as if by design, were blocked up and encumbered below, so that light came only from above. 'Devil take it, how well his face is lighted now!' he said to himself, and he began to paint greedily, as if fearing that the fortunate lighting might somehow disappear. 'What force!' he repeated to himself. 'If I depict him even half the way he is now, he'll kill all my saints and angels; they'll pale beside him. What diabolical force! He'll simply leap out of my canvas if I'm the least bit faithful to nature. What extraordinary features!' he constantly repeated, his zeal increasing, and he could already see certain features beginning to come over on canvas. But the closer he came to them, the more he felt some heavy, anxious feeling, incomprehensible to himself. However, despite that, he resolved to pursue every inconspicuous trait and expression with literal precision. First of all he set to work on the eyes. There was so much power in those eyes that it seemed impossible even to think of conveying them exactly as they were in nature. However, he determined at all costs to search out the least detail and nuance in them, to grasp their mystery… But as soon as he began to penetrate and delve into them with his brush, there arose such a strange revulsion in his soul, such inexplicable distress, that he had to lay his brush aside for a time and then begin again. In the end he could no longer endure it, he felt that these eyes had pierced his soul and produced an inconceivable anxiety in it. The next day, and the third, it became still stronger. He felt frightened. He threw down his brush and declared flatly that he was no longer able to paint him. You should have seen the change these words produced in the strange moneylender. He fell at his feet and beseeched him to finish the portrait, saying that his fate and his existence in the world depended on it, that he had already touched his living features with his brush, and that if he conveyed them faithfully, his life by some supernatural force would be retained in the portrait, that through it he would not die entirely, and that he had to be present in the world. My father felt horrified by these words: they seemed so strange and frightening to him that he threw down both brushes and palette and rushed headlong from the room.

"The thought of it troubled him all day and all night, and in the morning he received the portrait from the moneylender, brought by some woman, the only being in his service, who announced straight away that her master did not want the portrait, would pay nothing for it, and was sending it back. In the evening of the same day, he learned that the moneylender had died and was to be buried by the rites of his own religion. All this seemed inexplicably strange to him. And after that a perceptible change occurred in his character: he felt himself in an uneasy state of anxiety, the cause of which he could not understand, and soon he did something no one would have expected of him. For some time, the works of one of his pupils had begun to attract the attention of a small circle of experts and amateurs. My father had always seen talent in him and was particularly well-disposed toward him for that. Suddenly he became jealous of him. General concern and talk about the young man became unbearable to him. Finally, to crown his vexation, he found out that his pupil had been invited to do the pictures for a rich, newly constructed church. This made him explode. 'No, I won't let that greenhorn triumph!' he said. 'It's too early, brother, for you to be shoving old men into the ditch! I'm still strong, thank God. We'll see who shoves whom.' And this straightforward, honorable man turned to intrigue and scheming, something he had previously always scorned; he succeeded, finally, in having a competition for the pictures announced, and other painters could also enter their works in it. After that he shut himself in his room and ardently took up his brush. It seemed he wanted to put his whole strength, his whole self into it. And, indeed, it turned out to be one of his best works. No one doubted that he would take first place. The paintings were exhibited, and beside it all the others were as night to day. Then suddenly one of the members present, a clergyman if I'm not mistaken, made an observation that struck everyone. 'There is, indeed, much talent in the artist's picture,' he said, 'but there is no holiness in the faces; there is, on the contrary, something demonic in the eyes, as if the painter's hand was guided by an unclean feeling.' Everyone looked and could not but be convinced of the truth of these words. My father rushed up to his picture, as if to verify this offensive observation, and saw with horror that he had given almost all the figures the moneylender's eyes. Their gaze was so demonically destructive that he involuntarily shuddered. The picture was rejected, and he had to hear, to his indescribable vexation, the first place awarded to his pupil. It is impossible to describe the rage in which he returned home. He almost gave my mother a beating, chased the children away, broke all his brushes and his easel, snatched the portrait of the moneylender from the wall, asked for a knife, and ordered a fire made in the fireplace, intending to cut it to pieces and burn it. At that point he was found by a friend who came into the room, himself also a painter, a happy fellow, always pleased with himself, not carried away by any far-reaching desires, who worked happily at whatever came along and was even happier to get down to dining and carousing.

" 'What are you doing? What are you going to burn?' he said, and went up to the portrait. 'Good heavens, it's one of your best works. It's that moneylender who died recently; but it's a most perfect thing. You simply got him, not between the eyes but right in them. No eyes have ever stared the way you've made them stare.'

"'And now I'll see how they stare in the fire,' said my father, making a move to hurl it into the fireplace.

"'Stop, for God's sake!' said the friend, holding him back. 'Better give it to me, if you find it such an eyesore.'

"My father resisted at first, but finally consented, and the happy fellow, extremely pleased with his acquisition, took the portrait home.

"After he left, my father suddenly felt himself more at ease. Just as if, along with the portrait, a burden had fallen from his soul. He was amazed himself at his wicked feeling, his envy, and the obvious change in his character. Having considered his behavior, he was saddened at heart and said, not without inner grief:

" 'No, it is God punishing me. My painting deserved to suffer disgrace. It was intended to destroy my brother. The demonic feel- ing of envy guided my brush, and demonic feeling was bound to be reflected in it.'

"He immediately went to look for his former pupil, embraced him warmly, asked his forgiveness, and tried his best to smooth over his guilt before him. His work again went on as serenely as before; but pensiveness now showed more often on his face. He prayed more, was more often taciturn, and did not speak so sharply about people; the external roughness of his character somehow softened. Soon one circumstance shook him still more. He had not seen the friend who had begged the portrait from him for a long time. He was just about to go and see him when the man suddenly walked into his room unexpectedly. After a few words and questions on both sides, he said:

"'Well, brother, you weren't wrong to want to burn the portrait. Devil take it, there's something strange in it… I don't believe in witches, but like it or not, there's some unclean power sitting in it…'

" 'Meaning what?' said my father.

" 'Meaning that once I hung it in my room, I felt such anguish as if I wanted to put a knife in somebody. Never in my whole life have I known what insomnia is, and now I had not only insomnia but such dreams… I myself can't tell whether they were dreams or something else-as if some evil spirit was strangling me-and the accursed old man kept appearing in them. In short, I can't tell you what a state I was in. Nothing like it has ever happened to me. I wandered about like a lunatic all those days. I kept feeling some kind of fear, expecting something unpleasant. I felt I couldn't say a cheerful and sincere word to anybody: just as if some sort of spy was sitting next to me. And it was only when I gave the portrait to my nephew, who asked for it himself, that I suddenly felt as if a weight had fallen from my shoulders: I suddenly felt cheerful, as you see me now. Well, brother, you cooked up quite a devil!'

"My father listened to the story all the while with undivided attention, and finally said:

" 'And the portrait is now with your nephew?'

"'My nephew, hah! He couldn't stand it,' the cheerful fellow said. 'The moneylender's very soul must have transmigrated into it: he jumps out of the frame, walks around the room; and what my nephew tells, the mind simply can't grasp. I'd have taken him for a madman if I hadn't experienced some of it myself. He, too, sold it to some art collector, but that one couldn't bear it either and also unloaded it on somebody.'

"This story made a strong impression on my father. He fell to pondering seriously, lapsed into hypochondria, and in the end became fully convinced that his brush had served as a tool of the devil, that part of the moneylender's life had indeed passed somehow into the portrait and was now troubling people, inspiring them with demonic impulses, seducing the artist from his path, generating terrible torments of envy, and so on and so forth. Three misfortunes which befell him after that, three sudden deaths- his wife's, his daughter's, and his young son's-he considered as heaven's punishment of him, and he was absolutely resolved to leave this world. As soon as I turned nine, he enrolled me in the Academy of Art and, after paying off his creditors, withdrew to an isolated monastery, where he was soon tonsured a monk. There he amazed all the brothers by his strictness of life and unremitting observance of all monastery rules. The superior of the monastery, learning of his skill with the brush, requested that he paint the central icon in the church. But the humble brother said flatly that he was unworthy to take up his brush, that it had been defiled, that he would have to purify his soul with labors and great sacrifices before he would be worthy of setting about such a task. They did not wish to force him. He increased the strictness of monastery life for himself as far as possible. Finally even that became insufficient and not strict enough for him. With the blessing of his superior, he withdrew to the wilderness in order to be completely alone. There he built himself a hut out of branches, ate nothing but raw roots, dragged stones on his back from one place to another, stood in one place from dawn till sunset with his arms raised to heaven, ceaselessly reciting prayers. In short, he seemed to seek out all possible degrees of endurance and that inconceivable self-denial of which examples may be found only in the lives of the saints. Thus for a long time, over the course of several years, he exhausted his body, strengthening it at the same time with the vivifying power of prayer. Finally one day he came to the monastery and said firmly to the superior, 'Now I am ready. God willing, I will accomplish my work.' The subject he chose was the Nativity of Jesus. For a whole year he sat over it without leaving his cell, barely sustaining himself with strict fare, praying ceaselessly. At the end of a year, the picture was ready. It was indeed a miracle of the brush. You should know that neither the brothers nor the superior had much knowledge of painting, but everyone was struck by the extraordinary holiness of the figures; the feeling of divine humility and meekness in the face of the most pure Mother leaning over the Child, the profound intelligence in the eyes of the divine Child, as if they already perceived something in the distance, the solemn silence of the kings, struck by the divine wonder and prostrate at his feet, and, finally, the holy, inexpressible silence enveloping the whole picture-all this was expressed with such harmonious force and power of beauty that it produced a magical impression. The brothers all fell on their knees before the new icon, and the superior, moved to tenderness, said, 'No, it is not possible for a man, with the aid of human art only, to produce such a picture. A higher, holy power guided your brush, and the blessing of heaven rests on your work.' "Just then I finished my studies at the Academy, was given a gold medal and along with it the joyous hope of going to Italy-the best of dreams for a twenty-year-old painter. It only remained for me to bid farewell to my father, from whom I had parted twelve years earlier. I confess, even his very image had long since vanished from my memory. I had heard something about the strict holiness of his life and imagined beforehand meeting a hermit with a hard appearance, alien to everything in the world except his cell and his prayer, wasted away, dried up with eternal watching and fasting. What was my astonishment when there stood before me a beautiful, almost divine elder! No traces of exhaustion were to be seen on his face; it shone with the brightness of heavenly joy. A beard white as snow and fine, almost ethereal hair of the same silvery color flowed picturesquely down his breast and the folds of his black cassock, falling to the very rope tied around his poor monastic garb; but the most amazing thing for me was to hear from his lips such words and thoughts about art as, I confess, I shall long bear in my soul, and I wish sincerely that every brother of mine could do likewise.

"'I have been waiting for you, my son,' he said when I approached to receive his blessing. 'The path which your life will henceforth follow lies before you. This path is pure, do not deviate from it. You have talent, and talent is God's most precious gift-do not ruin it. Seek, study everything you see, submit everything to your brush, but learn to find the inner thought in everything, and try most of all to comprehend the lofty mystery of creation. Blessed is the chosen one who possesses it. No subject in nature is low for him. In the lowly the artist-creator is as great as he is in the great; for him the contemptible is no longer contemptible, for the beautiful soul of the creator shines invisibly through it, and the contemptible is given lofty expression, for it has passed through the purgatory of his soul. For man, art contains a hint of the divine, heavenly paradise, and this alone makes it higher than all else. As solemn peace is higher than all worldly trouble; as creation is higher than destruction; as an angel in the pure innocence of his bright soul is higher than all the innumerable powers and proud passions of Satan-so is a lofty artistic creation higher than anything that exists in the world. Give all in sacrifice to it and love it with all your passion. Not passion that breathes of earthly lust, but quiet, heavenly passion, without which man is powerless to rise above the earth and is unable to give the wondrous sounds of peace. For artistic creation comes down to earth to pacify and reconcile all people. It cannot instill murmuring in the soul, but in the sound of prayer strives eternally toward God. But there are moments, dark moments…'

"He paused, and I noticed that his bright countenance suddenly darkened, as if some momentary cloud passed over it.

" 'There was one event in my life,' he said. 'To this day I cannot understand what that strange image was whose portrait I painted. It was exactly like some diabolical phenomenon. I know the world rejects the existence of the devil, and therefore I will not speak of him. I will say only that I painted it with loathing, that I felt no love for my work at the time. I wanted forcefully to subject myself and to be faithful to nature, soullessly, having stifled everything. It was not a work of art, and therefore the feelings that overcome people as they look at it are stormy, troubling feelings-not the feelings of an artist, for an artist breathes peace even in the midst of trouble. I have been told that this portrait keeps changing hands and spreading its tormenting impressions, producing feelings of envy in an artist, a dark hatred for his brother, a spiteful yearning to persecute and oppress. May the Most High preserve you from such passions! Nothing is more terrible than they. Better to endure all the bitterness of possible persecution than cause even a shadow of persecution for someone else. Save the purity of your soul. He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else. Another will be forgiven much, but to him it will not be forgiven. A man who leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes. For on everyday clothes the spots do not show.'

"He blessed me and embraced me. Never in my life had I been so sublimely moved. With veneration rather than filial feeling, I leaned on his breast and kissed his flowing silver hair. A tear glistened in his eye.

" 'My son, fulfill one request for me,' he said at the very moment of parting. 'Perhaps you will chance to see somewhere the portrait of which I have spoken. You will recognize it at once by its extraordinary eyes and their unnatural expression. Destroy it at all costs…'

"You may judge for yourselves, how could 1 not promise to fulfill it faithfully? For all of fifteen years, I have never chanced to come across anything the least bit like the description given by my father, but now, suddenly, at this auction…"

Here, before finishing what he was saying, the painter turned his eyes to the wall in order to look at the portrait again. The whole crowd of his listeners instantly made the same movement, seeking the extraordinary portrait with their eyes. But to their great astonishment, it was no longer on the wall. A vague stir and murmuring went through the crowd, and after that the word "Stolen!" was clearly heard. Someone had managed to take it, seeing that the listeners' attention had been carried away by the story. And for a long time all those present remained perplexed, not knowing whether they had indeed seen those extraordinary eyes or it had merely been a dream, imagined just for an instant, by their eyes weary from the long examination of old paintings.

The Overcoat

In the department of… but it would be better not to say in which department. There is nothing more irascible than all these departments, regiments, offices-in short, all this officialdom. Nowadays every private individual considers the whole of society insulted in his person. They say a petition came quite recently from some police chief, I don't remember of what town, in which he states clearly that the government's decrees are perishing and his own sacred name is decidedly being taken in vain. And as proof he attached to his petition a most enormous tome of some novelistic work in which a police chief appears on every tenth page, in some places even in a totally drunken state. And so, to avoid any unpleasantness, it would be better to call the department in question a certain department. And so, in a certain department there served a certain clerk; a not very remarkable clerk, one might say-short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal… No help for it! the Petersburg climate is to blame. As for his rank (for with us rank must be announced first of all), he was what is called an eternal titular councillor, at whom, as is known, all sorts of writers have abundandy sneered and jeered, having the praisewor- thy custom of exerting themselves against those who can't bite. The clerk's last name was Bashmachkin. From the name itself one can already see that it once came from bashmak, or "shoe"; but when, at what time, and in what way it came from bashmak -none of that is known. His father, his grandfather, even his brother-in-law, and absolutely all the Bashmachkins, went around in boots, merely having them resoled three times a year. His name was Akaky Akakievich. The reader will perhaps find that somewhat strange and farfetched, but he can be assured that it was not fetched at all, but that such circumstances occurred of themselves as made it quite impossible to give him any other name, and here is precisely how it came about.

Akaky Akakievich was born, if memory serves me, during the night of the twenty-third of March. His late mother, a clerk's widow and a very good woman, decided, as was fitting, to have the baby baptized. The mother was still lying in bed opposite the door, and to her right stood the godfather, a most excellent man, Ivan Ivanovich Yeroshkin, who served as a chief clerk in the Senate, 1 and the godmother, the wife of a police officer, a woman of rare virtue, Arina Semyonovna Belobriushkova. The new mother was offered a choice of any of three names, whichever she wished to choose: Mokky, Sossy, or to name the baby after the martyr Khozdazat. "No," thought the late woman, "what sort of names are those?" To please her, they opened the calendar 2 to another place; again three names came out: Trifily, Dula, and Varakhasy. "What a punishment," the old woman said. "Such names, really, I've never heard the like. If only it were Varadat or Varukh, not Trifily and Varakhasy." They turned another page: out came Pavsikakhy and Vakhtisy. "Well, I see now," the old woman said, "it's evidently his fate. If so, better let him be named after his father. His father was Akaky, so let the son also be Akaky." Thus it was that Akaky Akakievich came about. As the child was being baptized, he cried and made such a face as if he anticipated that he would be a titular councillor. And so, that is how it all came about. We have told it so that the reader could see for himself that it happened entirely from necessity and that to give him any other name was quite impossible.

When and at what time he entered the department and who appointed him, no one could recall. However many directors and other superiors came and went, he was always to be seen in one and the same place, in the same position, in the same capacity, as the same copying clerk, so that after a while they became convinced that he must simply have been born into the world ready-made, in a uniform, and with a balding head. In the department he was shown no respect at all. The caretakers not only did not rise from their places when he passed, but did not even look at him, as if a mere fly had flown through the reception room. His superiors treated him somehow with cold despotism. Some chief clerk's assistant simply shoved papers under his nose without even saying "Copy them," or "Here's a nice, interesting little case," or something pleasant, as is customary in well-bred offices. And he took them, looking only at the papers, without regarding the one who put them there or whether he had the right to do so. He took them and immediately settled down to copying them. The young clerks poked fun at him and cracked jokes, to the extent that office wit allowed; told right in front of him various stories they had made up about him, about his landlady, a seventy-year-old crone, saying that she beat him, asking when their wedding was to be, dumping torn-up paper over his head and calling it snow. But not one word of response came from Akaky Akakievich, as if no one was there; it did not even affect the work he did: amidst all this pestering, he made not a single error in his copy. Only when the joke was really unbearable, when they josded his arm, interfering with what he was doing, would he say, "Let me be. Why do you offend me?" And there was something strange in the words and in the voice in which they were uttered. Something sounded in it so conducive to pity that one recently appointed young man who, following the example of the others, had first allowed himself to make fun of him, suddenly stopped as if transfixed, and from then on everything seemed changed before him and acquired a different look. Some unnatural power pushed him away from his comrades, whose acquaintance he had made thinking them decent, well-mannered men. And long afterwards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: "Let me be. Why do you offend me?"-and in these penetrating words rang other words: "I am your brother." And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands, and many a time in his life he shuddered to see how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners, and God! even in a man the world regards as noble and honorable…

It would hardly be possible to find a man who lived so much in his work. It is not enough to say he served zealously-no, he served with love. There, in that copying, he saw some varied and pleasant world of his own. Delight showed in his face; certain letters were his favorites, and when he came to one of them, he was beside himself: he chuckled and winked and helped out with his lips, so that it seemed one could read on his face every letter his pen traced. If his zeal had been rewarded correspondingly, he might, to his own amazement, have gone as far as state councillor; yet his reward, as his witty comrades put it, was a feather in his hat and hemorrhoids where he sat. However, it was impossible to say he went entirely unnoticed. One director, being a kindly man and wishing to reward him for long service, ordered that he be given something more important than the usual copying-namely, he was told to change an already existing document into a letter to another institution; the matter consisted merely in changing the heading and changing some verbs from first to third person. This was such a task for him that he got all in a sweat, rubbed his forehead, and finally said, "No, better let me copy something." After that he was left copying forever. Outside this copying nothing seemed to exist for him. He gave no thought to his clothes at all: his uniform was not green but of some mealy orange. The collar he wore was narrow, low, so that though his neck was not long, it looked extraordinarily long protruding from this collar, as with those head-wagging plaster kittens that foreign peddlers carry about by the dozen on their heads. And there was always something stuck to his uniform: a wisp of straw or a bit of thread; moreover, he had a special knack, as he walked in the street, of getting under a window at the precise moment when some sort of trash was being thrown out of it, and, as a result, he was eternally carrying around melon or watermelon rinds and other such rubbish on his hat. Not once in his life did he ever pay attention to what was going on or happening every day in the street, which, as is known, his young fellow clerk always looks at, his pert gaze so keen that he even notices when someone on the other side of the street has the footstrap of his trousers come undone-which always provokes a sly smile on his face.

But Akaky Akakievich, even if he looked at something, saw in everything his own neat lines, written in an even hand, and only when a horse's muzzle, coming out of nowhere, placed itself on his shoulder and blew real wind from its nostrils onto his cheek- only then would he notice that he was not in the middle of a line, but rather in the middle of the street. Coming home, he would sit down straight away at the table, hastily slurp up his cabbage soup and eat a piece of beef with onions, without ever noticing their taste, and he would eat it all with flies and whatever else God sent him at the time. Noticing that his stomach was full, he would get up from the table, take out a bottle of ink, and copy documents he had brought home. If there chanced to be none, he made copies especially for his own pleasure, particularly if the document was distinguished not by the beauty of its style but by its being addressed to some new or important person.

Even in those hours when the gray Petersburg sky fades completely and all clerical folk have eaten their fill and finished dinner, each as he could, according to his salary and his personal fancy- when all have rested after the departmental scratching of pens, the rushing about seeing to their own and other people's needful occupations, and all that irrepressible man heaps voluntarily on himself even more than is necessary-when clerks hasten to give the remaining time to pleasure: the more ambitious rushing to the theater; another going out to devote it to gazing at silly hats; another to a party, to spend it paying compliments to some pretty girl, the star of a small clerical circle; still another, and this happens most often, simply going to his own kind, to some fourth or third floor, two small rooms with a front hall and a kitchen, with some claim to fashion, a lamp or other object that cost great sacrifices, the giving up of dinners, outings-in short, even at that time when all clerks disperse to their friends' small apartments to play cutthroat whist, sipping tea from glasses, with one-kopeck rusks, puffing smoke through long chibouks, repeating while the cards are being dealt some gossip blown over from high society, something a Russian man can never give up under any circumstances, or even, when there is nothing to talk about, retelling the eternal joke about the commandant who was brought word that the horse of Falconet's monument 3 had had its tail docked-in short, even when everything strives for diversion-Akaky Akakievich did not give himself up to any diversion. No one could say he had ever been seen at any party. When he had written his fill, he would go to bed, smiling beforehand at the thought of the next day: What would God send him to copy tomorrow? So flowed the peaceful life of this man who, with a salary of four hundred, was able to content himself with his lot, and so it might have flowed on into extreme old age, had it not been for the various calamities strewn along the path of life, not only of titular, but even of privy, actual, court, and other councillors, even of those who neither give counsel nor take any themselves.

There exists in Petersburg a powerful enemy of all who earn a salary of four hundred roubles or thereabouts. This enemy is none other than our northern frost, though, incidentally, people say it is very healthful. Toward nine o'clock in the morning, precisely the hour when the streets are covered with people going to their offices, it starts dealing such strong and sharp flicks to all noses indiscriminately that the poor clerks decidedly do not know where to put them. At that time, when even those who occupy high positions have an ache in their foreheads from the cold and tears come to their eyes, poor titular councillors are sometimes defenseless. The whole of salvation consists in running as quickly as possible, in your skimpy overcoat, across five or six streets and then standing in the porter's lodge, stamping your feet good and hard, thereby thawing out all your job-performing gifts and abilities, which had become frozen on the way. Akaky Akakievich had for a certain time begun to feel that he was somehow getting it especially in the back and shoulder, though he tried to run across his allotted space as quickly as possible. He thought finally that the sin might perhaps lie with his overcoat. Examining it well at home, he discovered that in two or three places-namely, on the back and shoulders-it had become just like burlap; the broadcloth was so worn out that it was threadbare, and the lining had fallen to pieces. It should be known that Akaky Akakievich's overcoat also served as an object of mockery for the clerks; they even deprived it of the noble name of overcoat and called it a housecoat. Indeed, it was somehow strangely constituted: its collar diminished more and more each year, for it went to mend other parts. The mending did not testify to any skill in the tailor, and the results were in fact crude and unsightly. Seeing what the situation was, Akaky Akakievich decided that the overcoat had to be taken to Petrovich the tailor, who lived somewhere on a fourth floor, up a back entrance, and who, in spite of his blind eye and the pockmarks all over his face, performed the mending of clerkly and all other trousers and tailcoats quite successfully-to be sure, when he was sober and not entertaining any other projects in his head. Of this tailor, of course, not much should be said, but since there exists a rule that the character of every person in a story be well delineated, there's no help for it, let us have Petrovich here as well. In the beginning he was simply called Grigory and was some squire's serf; he began to be called Petrovich when he was freed and started drinking rather heavily on feast days-first on great feasts, and then on all church feasts indiscriminately, wherever a little cross appeared on the calendar. In this respect he was true to the customs of his forebears and, in arguing with his wife, used to call her a worldly woman and a German. 4 Now that we've mentioned the wife, we ought to say a couple of words about her as well; but, unfortunately, not much is known about her, except that Petrovich had a wife, and that she even wore a bonnet, not a kerchief; but it seems she could not boast of her beauty; at least, when meeting her, only guardsmen looked under her bonnet, winking their mustaches and emitting some special noise.

Climbing the stairway leading to Petrovich, which, to do it jus- tice, was all dressed with water and swill, and redolent throughout of that spiritous smell that makes the eyes smart and is inevitably present in all back stairways of Petersburg houses-climbing the stairway, Akaky Akakievich was thinking about how much Petro-vich would ask, and mentally decided not to pay more than two roubles. The door was open, because the mistress of the house, while cooking fish, had filled the kitchen with so much smoke that even the cockroaches themselves could no longer be seen. Akaky Akakievich passed through the kitchen, unnoticed even by the mistress herself, and finally went into the room, where he saw Petrovich sitting on a wide, unpainted wooden table, his legs tucked under him like a Turkish pasha's. His feet, after the custom of tailors sitting over their work, were bare. The eye was struck first of all by his big toe, very familiar to Akaky Akakievich, with a somehow disfigured nail, thick and strong as tortoise shell. From Petrovich's neck hung a skein of silk and thread, and on his knees lay some rag. He had already spent three minutes trying to put a thread through the eye of a needle and missing, and therefore he was very angry with the darkness and even with the thread itself, grumbling under his breath, "Won't go through, the barbarian! Get the better of me, you rascal!" Akaky Akakievich was upset that he had come precisely at a moment when Petrovich was angry: he liked dealing with Petrovich when the latter was already a bit under the influence, or, as his wife used to put it, "got himself tight on rotgut, the one-eyed devil." In that condition, Petrovich usually gave in and agreed very willingly, and even bowed and thanked him each time. Later, it's true, his wife would come, lamenting that her husband had been drunk and had asked too little; but a ten-kopeck piece would be added, and the deal was in the hat. Now, however, Petrovich seemed to be in a sober state, and therefore tough, intractable, and liable to demand devil knows what price. Akaky Akakievich grasped that fact and was, as they say, about to backtrack, but the thing was already under way. Petrovich squinted at him very intently with his only eye, and Akaky Akakievich involuntarily said: "Good day, Petrovich!"

"Good day to you, sir," said Petrovich, and cocked his eye at Akaky Akakievich's hands, trying to see what sort of booty he was bringing.

"I've come to you, Petrovich, sort of…"

It should be known that Akaky Akakievich expressed himself mostly with prepositions, adverbs, and finally such particles as have decidedly no meaning. If the matter was very difficult, he even had the habit of not finishing the phrase at all, so that very often he would begin his speech with the words "That, really, is altogether sort of…" after which would come nothing, and he himself would forget it, thinking everything had been said.

"What's this?" said Petrovich, at the same time giving his uniform a thorough inspection with his only eye, beginning with the collar, then the sleeves, back, skirts, and buttonholes-all of which was quite familiar to him, since it was his own handiwork. Such is the custom among tailors: it's the first thing they do when they meet someone.

"And I've come, Petrovich, sort of… this overcoat, the broadcloth… you see, in all other places it's quite strong, it got a bit dusty and so it seems as if it's old, but it's new, only in one place it's a bit sort of… on the back, and here on one shoulder it's a bit worn, and on this shoulder a little bit-you see, that's all. Not much work…"

Petrovich took the housecoat, laid it out on the table first, examined it for a long time, shook his head, and reached his hand out to the windowsill to get his round snuffbox with the portrait of some general on it-which one is not known, because the place where the face was had been poked through by a finger and then pasted over with a rectangular piece of paper. Having taken a pinch, Petrovich stretched the housecoat on his hands and examined it against the light and again shook his head. Then he turned it inside out and shook his head once more, once more opened the lid with the general pasted over with paper, and, having filled his nose with snuff, closed the box, put it away, and finally said:

"No, impossible to fix it-bad wardrobe."

At these words, Akaky Akakievich's heart missed a beat.

"Why impossible, Petrovich?" he said, almost in a child's pleading voice. "It's only a bit worn on the shoulders-surely you have some little scraps…"

"Little scraps might be found, we might find some little scraps," said Petrovich, "but it's impossible to sew them on-the stuff's quite rotten, touch it with a needle and it falls apart."

"Falls apart, and you patch it over."

"But there's nothing to put a patch on, nothing for it to hold to, it's too worn out. They pass it off as broadcloth, but the wind blows and it flies to pieces."

"Well, you can make it hold. Otherwise, really, it's sort of…!"

"No," Petrovich said resolutely, "it's impossible to do anything. The stuff's no good. You'd better make yourself foot cloths out of it when the winter cold comes, because socks don't keep you warm. It's Germans invented them so as to earn more money for themselves." (Petrovich liked needling the Germans on occasion.) "And it appears you'll have to have a new overcoat made."

At the word "new" all went dim in Akaky Akakievich's eyes, and everything in the room became tangled before him. The only thing he saw clearly was the general with paper pasted over his face who was on the lid of Petrovich's snuffbox.

"How's that-new?" he said, still as if in sleep. "I have no money for that."

"Yes, new," Petrovich said with barbaric calm.

"Well, if it must be a new one, what would it, sort of…"

"You mean, how much would it cost?"

"Yes."

"Three times fifty and then some would have to go into it," Petrovich said and pressed his lips together meaningfully. He very much liked strong effects, liked somehow to confound one completely all of a sudden and then glance sideways at the face the confounded one pulls at such words.

"A hundred and fifty roubles for an overcoat?" poor Akaky Akakievich cried out-cried out, perhaps, for the first time in all his born days, for he was always distinguished by the softness of his voice.

"Yes, sir," said Petrovich, "depending also on the overcoat. If we put a marten on the collar, plus a hood with silk lining, it may come to two hundred."

"Please, Petrovich," Akaky Akakievich said in a pleading voice, not hearing and not trying to hear all Petrovich's words and effects, "fix it somehow, so that it can serve a while longer at least."

"Ah, no, that'll be work gone for naught and money wasted," said Petrovich, and after these words Akaky Akakievich left, totally annihilated.

And Petrovich, on his departure, stood for a long time, his lips pressed together meaningfully, without going back to work, feeling pleased that he had not lowered himself or betrayed the art of tailoring.

When he went outside, Akaky Akakievich was as if in a dream. "So it's that, that's what it is," he said to himself. "I really didn't think it would come out sort of…" and then, after some silence, he added, "So that's how it is! that's what finally comes out! and I really never would have supposed it would be so." Following that, a long silence again ensued, after which he said, "So that's it! Such an, indeed, altogether unexpected, sort of… it's altogether… such a circumstance!" Having said this, instead of going home, he went in the entirely opposite direction, without suspecting it himself. On the way, a chimney sweep brushed against him with his whole dirty flank, blackening his whole shoulder; a full hat-load of lime poured down on him from the top of a house under construction. He did not notice any of it, and only later, when he ran into an on-duty policeman who, having set aside his halberd, was shaking snuff from his snuff bottle onto his callused fist, only then did he recover his senses slightly, and that only because the policeman said, "What're you doing, barging into my mug! Don't you have enough sidewalk?" This made him look around and turn back home. Only here did he begin to collect his thoughts, see his situation clearly for what it was, and start talking to himself, not in snatches now but sensibly and frankly, as with a reasonable friend with whom one could discuss the most heartfelt and intimate things. "Ah, no," said Akaky Akakievich, "it's impossible to talk with Petrovich now: now he's sort of… his wife must somehow have given him a beating. I'll do better to come to him on Sunday morning: he'll be cockeyed and sleepy after Saturday night, and he'll need the hair of the dog, and his wife won't give him any money, and just then I'll sort of… ten kopecks in his hand, he'll be more tractable then, and then the overcoat sort of…" So Akaky Akakievich reasoned with himself, encouraged himself, and waited for the next Sunday, when, seeing from afar Petrovich's wife leave the house for somewhere, he went straight to him. Petrovich was indeed badly cockeyed after Saturday, could hardly hold his head up, and was quite sleepy; but for all that, as soon as he learned what it was about, it was as if the devil gave him a nudge. "Impossible," he said, "be so good as to order a new one." Here Akaky Akakievich gave him a ten-kopeck piece. "Thank you, sir, I'll fortify myself a bit for your health," said Petrovich, "but concerning the overcoat, please don't trouble yourself-it's no good for anything good. I'll make you a new overcoat, I'll do it up famously, that I will."

Akaky Akakievich tried to mention mending again, but Petrovich did not listen to the end and said, "I'll make you a new one without fail, please count on me for that, I'll do my best. It may even be in today's fashion, the collar fastened by little silver clasps with applique."

Here Akaky Akakievich saw that he could not get around a new overcoat, and his spirits wilted completely. How, indeed, with what, with what money to make it? Of course, he could count partly on his future holiday bonus, but that money had been placed and distributed long ago. He needed to get new trousers, to pay an old debt to the shoemaker for putting new vamps on his old boot tops, and he had to order three shirts from the seamstress and a couple of pairs of that item of underwear which it is indecent to mention in print-in short, absolutely all the money was to be spent; and even if the director was so gracious as to allot him a forty-five- or fifty-rouble bonus, instead of forty, all the same only a trifle would be left, which in the overcoat capital would be like a drop in the ocean. Though he knew, of course, that Petrovich had a trick of suddenly asking devil knows how incongruously high a price, so that his own wife sometimes could not keep herself from exclaiming, "Have you lost your mind, fool that you are! One day he takes a job for nothing, and now the evil one gets him to ask more than he's worth himself." Though he knew, of course, that Petrovich would agree to do it for eighty roubles-even so, where to get the eighty roubles? Now, it might be possible to find half; half could be produced; maybe even a little more; but where to get the other half?… But first the reader should learn where the one half would come from. Akaky Akakievich was in the habit of setting aside a half kopeck for every rouble he spent, putting it into a little box with a lock and key and a small hole cut in the lid for dropping money through. At the end of every half year he inspected the accumulated sum of copper and exchanged it for small silver. Thus he continued for a long time, and in this way, over the course of several years, he turned out to have saved a total of more than forty roubles. And so, one half was in hand; but where to get the other half? Where to get the other forty roubles? Akaky Akakievich thought and thought and decided that he would have to cut down his usual expenses, at least for a year; to abolish the drinking of tea in the evening, to burn no candles in the evening, and if there was a need to do something, to go to the landlady's room and work by her candle; to make the lightest and most careful steps possible when walking in the street, over cobbles and pavements, almost on tiptoe, thereby avoiding the rapid wearing out of soles; to send his linen to the laundry as seldom as possible, and to prevent soiling it by taking it off each time on coming home, remaining in a half-cotton dressing gown, a very old one, spared even by time itself. Truth to tell, it was a bit difficult for him at first to get used to such limitations, but later it somehow became a habit and went better; he even accustomed himself to going entirely without food in the evenings; but instead he was nourished spiritually, bearing in his thoughts the eternal idea of the future overcoat. From then on it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he were married, as if some other person were there with him, as if he were not alone but some pleasant life's companion had agreed to walk down the path of life with him-and this companion was none other than that same over- coat with its cotton-wool quilting, with its sturdy lining that knew no wear. He became somehow livelier, even firmer of character, like a man who has defined and set a goal for himself. Doubt, indecision-in short, all hesitant and uncertain features-disappeared of themselves from his face and actions. Fire occasionally showed in his eyes, the most bold and valiant thoughts even flashed in his head: Might he not indeed put a marten on the collar? These reflections led him nearly to distraction. Once, as he was copying a paper, he even nearly made a mistake, so that he cried "Oh!" almost aloud and crossed himself. In the course of each month, he stopped at least once to see Petrovich, to talk about the overcoat, where it was best to buy broadcloth, and of what color, and at what price, and he would return home somewhat preoccupied yet always pleased, thinking that the time would finally come when all this would be bought and the overcoat would be made. Things went even more quickly than he expected. Contrary to all expectations, the director allotted Akaky Akakievich not forty or forty-five but a whole sixty roubles; whether he sensed that Akaky Akakievich needed an overcoat, or it happened that way of itself, in any case he acquired on account of it an extra twenty roubles. This circumstance speeded the course of things. Another two or three months of going a bit hungry-and Akaky Akakievich had, indeed, about eighty roubles. His heart, generally quite calm, began to throb. The very next day he went shopping with Petrovich. They bought very good broadcloth-and no wonder, because they had begun thinking about it six months before and had hardly ever let a month go by without stopping at a shop and inquiring about prices; and Petrovich himself said that better broadcloth did not exist. For the lining they chose chintz, but of such good, sturdy quality that, according to Petrovich, it was even better than silk and looked more attractive and glossy. They did not buy a marten, because it was indeed expensive; but instead they chose a cat, the best they could find in the shop, a cat which from afar could always be taken for a marten. Petrovich fussed with the overcoat for a whole two weeks, because there was a lot of quilting to do; otherwise it would have been ready sooner. For his work,

Petrovich took twelve roubles-it simply couldn't have been less: decidedly everything was sewn with silk, in small double seams, and afterwards Petrovich went along each seam with his own teeth, imprinting it with various designs. It was… it's hard to say precisely which day, but it was probably the most festive day in Akaky Akakievich's life, when Petrovich finally brought the overcoat. He brought it in the morning, just before it was time to go to the office. At no other time could the overcoat have come so appropriately, because very bitter frosts were already setting in and, it seemed, were threatening to get still worse. Petrovich came with the overcoat as befits a good tailor. His face acquired a more important expression than Akaky Akakievich had ever seen before. It seemed he felt in full measure that he had done no small thing and had suddenly revealed in himself the abyss that separates tailors who only put in linings and do repairs from those who sew new things. He took the overcoat out of the handkerchief in which he had brought it; the handkerchief was fresh from the laundry, and he proceeded to fold it and put it in his pocket for further use. Having taken out the overcoat, he looked very proud and, holding it in both hands, threw it deftly around Akaky Akakievich's shoulders; then he pulled it down and straightened the back with his hands; then he draped it over Akaky Akakievich unbuttoned. Akaky Akakievich, being a man of a certain age, wanted to try the sleeves; Petrovich helped him on with the sleeves-it turned out that with the sleeves it was also good. In short, it appeared that the overcoat was just right and fitted perfectly. Petrovich did not miss the chance of saying that it was only because he lived without a shingle, on a small street, and, besides, had known Akaky Akakievich for a long time, that he was asking so little; that on Nevsky Prospect he would pay seventy-five roubles for the work alone. Akaky Akakievich did not want to discuss it with Petrovich, and besides was afraid of all those mighty sums with which Petrovich liked to blow smoke. He paid him, thanked him, and left for the office at once in the new overcoat. Petrovich followed him out and, standing in the street, went on for a long time looking at the overcoat in the distance, then went purposely to the side, so as to make a detour down a crooked lane, run back out to the street ahead of him, and thus look at his overcoat from the other direction-that is, straight in the face. Meanwhile, Akaky Akakievich walked on in the most festive disposition of all his feelings. At each instant of every minute he felt that there was a new overcoat on his shoulders, and several times he even smiled from inner satisfaction. In fact, there were two profits: one that it was warm, the other that it was good. He did not notice the road at all and suddenly found himself at the office; in the porter's lodge he took the overcoat off, looked it all over, and entrusted it to the porter's special care. In some unknown way everyone in the department suddenly learned that Akaky Akakievich had a new overcoat and that the housecoat no longer existed. Everyone immediately ran out to the porter's lodge to look at Akaky Akakievich's new overcoat. They began to congratulate him, to cheer him, so that at first he only smiled, but then even became embarrassed. And when everyone accosted him and began saying that they should drink to the new overcoat, and that he should at least throw a party for them all, Akaky Akakievich was completely at a loss, did not know what to do, how to reply, or how to excuse himself from it. After several minutes, blushing all over, he began assuring them quite simple-heartedly that it was not a new overcoat at all, that it was just so, that it was an old overcoat. Finally one of the clerks, even some sort of assistant to the chief clerk, probably in order to show that he was by no means a proud man and even kept company with subordinates, said, "So be it, I'll throw a party instead of Akaky Akakievich and invite everyone tonight for tea: today also happens to be my name day." Naturally, the clerks straight away congratulated the chief clerk's assistant and willingly accepted the invitation. Akaky Akakievich tried to begin excusing himself, but everyone started to say that it was impolite, that it was simply a shame and a disgrace, and it was quite impossible for him not to accept. Afterwards, however, he was pleased when he remembered that he would thus even have occasion to take a stroll that evening in his new overcoat. For Akaky Akakievich the whole of that day was like the greatest festive holiday. He came home in the happiest state of mind, took off his overcoat and hung it carefully on the wall, having once more admired the broadcloth and the lining, and then he purposely took out for comparison his former housecoat, completely fallen to pieces. He looked at it and even laughed himself: so far was the difference! And for a long time afterwards, over dinner, he kept smiling whenever he happened to think of the condition of his housecoat. He dined cheerfully and wrote nothing after dinner, no documents, but just played a bit of the Sybarite in his bed until it turned dark. Then, without tarrying, he got dressed, put on his overcoat, and left.

Precisely where the clerk who had invited him lived, we unfortunately cannot say: our memory is beginning to fail us badly, and whatever there is in Petersburg, all those houses and streets, has so mixed and merged together in our head that it is very hard to get anything out of it in a decent fashion. Be that as it may, it is at least certain that the clerk lived in a better part of town-meaning not very near to Akaky Akakievich. Akaky Akakievich had first to pass through some deserted, sparsely lit streets, but as he approached the clerk's home, the streets became livelier, more populous, and better lit. Pedestrians flashed by more frequently, ladies began to appear, beautifully dressed, some of the men wore beaver collars, there were fewer cabbies with their wooden-grill sleds studded with gilded nails-on the contrary, coachmen kept passing in raspberry-colored velvet hats, with lacquered sleds and bearskin rugs, or carriages with decorated boxes flew down the street, their wheels shrieking over the snow. Akaky Akakievich looked at it all as at something new. It was several years since he had gone out in the evening. He stopped curiously before a lighted shop window to look at a picture that portrayed some beautiful woman taking off her shoe and thus baring her whole leg, not a bad leg at all; and behind her back, from another room, some man stuck his head out, with side-whiskers and a handsome imperial under his lip. Akaky Akakievich shook his head and chuckled, and then went on his way. Why did he chuckle? Was it because he had encountered something totally unfamiliar, of which everyone nevertheless still preserves some sort of intuition; or had he thought, like many other clerks, as follows: "Well, these Frenchmen! what can you say, if they want something sort of… it's really sort of…" But maybe he didn't think even that-it's really impossible to get inside a man's soul and learn all he thinks.

At last he reached the house where the chief clerk's assistant lived. The chief clerk's assistant lived in grand style: the stairway was lighted, the apartment was on the second floor. Entering the front hall, Akaky Akakievich saw whole rows of galoshes on the floor. Among them, in the middle of the room, a samovar stood hissing and letting out clouds of steam. On the walls hung overcoats and cloaks, some among them even with beaver collars or velvet lapels. Behind the walls, noise and talk could be heard, which suddenly became clear and loud as the door opened and a lackey came out with a tray laden with empty glasses, a pitcher of cream, and a basket of rusks. It was evident that the clerks had gathered long ago and had already finished their first glass of tea. Akaky Akakievich, having hung up his overcoat himself, went into the room, and before him simultaneously flashed candles, clerks, pipes, and card tables, while his hearing was struck vaguely by a rush of conversation arising on all sides and the noise of chairs being moved. He stopped quite awkwardly in the middle of the room, looking about and trying to think what to do. But he was already noticed, greeted with cries, and everyone went at once to the front hall and again examined his overcoat. Akaky Akakievich was somewhat embarrassed, yet being a pure-hearted man, he could not help rejoicing to see how everyone praised his overcoat. After that, naturally, everyone dropped both him and his overcoat and turned, as usual, to the tables set up for whist. All of this- the noise, the talk, the crowd of people-all of it was somehow strange to Akaky Akakievich. He simply did not know what to do, where to put his hands and feet, or his whole self; he finally sat down with the players, looked at the cards, looked into the face of one or another, and in a short while began to yawn, feeling himself bored, the more so as it was long past the time when he customarily went to bed. He tried to take leave of the host, but the host would not let him go, saying that they absolutely had to drink a glass of champagne to the new coat. An hour later a supper was served which consisted of mixed salad, cold veal, pate, sweet pas- try, and champagne. Akaky Akakievich was forced to drink two glasses, after which he felt that the room had become merrier, yet he was unable to forget that it was already midnight and long since time to go home. So that the host should not somehow decide to detain him, he quietly left the room, went to the front hall to find his overcoat, which he saw, not without regret, lying on the floor, shook it, cleaned every feather off it, put it over his shoulders, went downstairs and outside. Outside it was still light. Some small-goods shops, those permanent clubs for servants and various others, were open; those that were closed still showed a stream of light the whole length of the door chink, indicating that they were not yet devoid of company and that the housemaids and servants were probably finishing their talks and discussions, while their masters were thrown into utter perplexity as to their whereabouts. Akaky Akakievich walked along in a merry state of mind, and even suddenly ran, for some unknown reason, after some lady who passed by like lightning, every part of whose body was filled with extraordinary movement. However, he stopped straight away and again walked very slowly, as before, marveling to himself at this spright-liness of unknown origin. Soon there stretched before him those deserted streets which even in the daytime are none too cheerful, much less in the evening. Now they had become still more desolate and solitary: street lamps flashed less often-evidently the supply of oil was smaller; there were wooden houses, fences; not a soul anywhere; only snow glittered in the streets, and sleepy low hovels with closed shutters blackened mournfully. He approached a place where the street was intersected by an endless square that looked like a terrible desert, with houses barely visible on the other side.

Far away, God knows where, a light flashed in some sentry box that seemed to be standing at the edge of the world. Here Akaky Akakievich's merriment somehow diminished considerably. He entered the square not without some inadvertent fear, as if his heart had a foreboding of something bad. He looked behind him and to the sides: just like a sea all around him. "No, better not to look," he thought and walked with closed eyes, and when he opened them to see how far the end of the square was, he sud- denly saw before him, almost in front of his nose, some mustached people, precisely what sort he could not even make out. His eyes grew dim, his heart pounded in his chest. "That overcoat's mine!" one of them said in a thundering voice, seizing him by the collar. Akaky Akakievich was about to shout "Help!" when the other one put a fist the size of a clerk's head right to his mouth and said, "Just try shouting!" Akaky Akakievich felt only that his overcoat was taken off him, he was given a kick with a knee and fell face down in the snow, and then felt no more. After a few minutes, he came to his senses and got to his feet, but no one was there. He felt it was cold in the field and the overcoat was gone; he began to shout, but his voice seemed never to reach the ends of the square. In desperation, shouting constantly, he started running across the square, straight to the sentry box, beside which stood an on-duty policeman, leaning on his halberd, watching with apparent curiosity, desirous of knowing why the devil a man was running toward him from far away and shouting. Akaky Akakievich, running up to him, began shouting in a breathless voice that he had been asleep, not on watch, and had not seen how a man was being robbed. The policeman replied that he had seen nothing; that he had seen him being stopped by two men in the middle of the square but had thought they were his friends; and that, instead of denouncing him for no reason, he should go to the inspector tomorrow and the inspector would find out who took the overcoat. Akaky Akakievich came running home in complete disorder: the hair that still grew in small quantities on his temples and the back of his head was completely disheveled; his side, chest, and trousers were covered with snow. The old woman, his landlady, hearing a terrible knocking at the door, hastily jumped out of bed and ran with one shoe on to open it, holding her nightgown to her breast out of modesty; but when she opened the door she stepped back, seeing what state Akaky Akakievich was in. When he told her what was the matter, she clasped her hands and said he must go straight to the superintendent, that the inspector would cheat him, make promises and then lead him by the nose; and that it was best to go to the superintendent, that he was a man of her acquaintance, because Anna, the Finnish woman who used to work for her as a cook, had now got herself hired at the superintendent's as a nanny, and that she often saw him herself as he drove past their house, and that he also came to church every Sunday, prayed, and at the same time looked cheerfully at everyone, and therefore was by all tokens a good man. Having listened to this decision, Akaky Akakievich plodded sadly to his room, and how he spent the night we will leave to the judgment of those capable of entering at least somewhat into another man's predicament.

Early in the morning he went to the superintendent but was told that he was asleep; he came at ten and again was told: asleep; he came at eleven o'clock and was told that the superintendent was not at home; at lunchtime the scriveners in the front room refused to let him in and insisted on knowing what his business was, what necessity had brought him there, and what had happened. So that finally, for once in his life, Akaky Akakievich decided to show some character and said flatly that he had to see the superintendent himself, in person, that they dared not refuse to admit him, that he had come from his department on official business, and that he would make a complaint about them and they would see. The scriveners did not dare to say anything against that, and one of them sent to call the superintendent. The superintendent took the story about the theft of the overcoat somehow extremely strangely. Instead of paying attention to the main point of the case, he began to question Akaky Akakievich-why was he coming home so late, and had he not stopped and spent some time in some indecent house?-so that Akaky Akakievich was completely embarrassed and left him not knowing whether the case of his overcoat would take its proper course or not. He did not go to the office all that day (the only time in his life). The next day he arrived all pale and in his old housecoat, which now looked still more lamentable. Though some of the clerks did not miss their chance to laugh at Akaky Akakievich even then, still the story of the theft of the overcoat moved many. They decided straight away to take up a collection for him, but they collected a mere trifle, because the clerks had already spent a lot, having subscribed to a portrait of the director and to some book, at the suggestion of the section chief, who was a friend of the author-and so, the sum turned out to be quite trifling. One of them, moved by compassion, decided at least to help Akaky Akakievich with good advice, telling him not to go to the police because, though it might happen that a policeman, wishing to gain the approval of his superior, would somehow find the overcoat, still the overcoat would remain with the police unless he could present legal proofs that it belonged to him; and the best thing would be to address a certain important person, so that the important person, by writing and referring to the proper quarters, could get things done more successfully. No help for it, Akaky Akakievich decided to go to the important person. What precisely the post of the important person was, and in what it consisted, remains unknown. It should be realized that this certain important person had become an important person only recently, and till then had been an unimportant person. However, his position even now was not considered important in comparison with other, still more important ones. But there will always be found a circle of people for whom something unimportant in the eyes of others is already important. He tried, however, to increase his importance by many other means-namely, he introduced the custom of lower clerks meeting him on the stairs when he came to the office; of no one daring to come to him directly, but everything going in the strictest order: a collegiate registrar should report to a provincial secretary, a provincial secretary to a titular or whatever else, and in this fashion the case should reach him. Thus everything in holy Russia is infected with imitation, and each one mimics and apes his superior. It is even said that some titular councillor, when he was made chief of some separate little chancellery, at once partitioned off a special room for himself, called it his "office room," and by the door placed some sort of ushers with red collars and galloons, who held the door handle and opened it for each visitor, though the "office room" could barely contain an ordinary writing desk. The ways and habits of the important person were imposing and majestic, but of no great complexity. The chief principle of his system was strictness. "Strictness, strictness, and-strictness," he used to say, and with the last word usually looked very importantly into the face of the person he was addressing. Though, incidentally, there was no reason for any of it, because the dozen or so clerks who constituted the entire administrative machinery of the office were properly filled with fear even without that; seeing him from far off, they set their work aside and waited, standing at attention, until their superior passed through the room. His usual conversation with subordinates rang with strictness and consisted almost entirely of three phrases: "How dare you? Do you know with whom you are speaking? Do you realize who is standing before you?" However, he was a kind man at heart, good to his comrades, obliging, but the rank of general had completely bewildered him. On receiving the rank of general, he had somehow become confused, thrown off, and did not know how to behave at all. When he happened to be with his equals, he was as a man ought to be, a very decent man, in many respects even not a stupid man; but as soon as he happened to be in the company of men at least one rank beneath him, he was simply as bad as could be: he kept silent, and his position was pitiable, especially since he himself felt that he could be spending his time incomparably better. In his eyes there could sometimes be seen a strong desire to join in some interesting conversation and circle, but he was stopped by the thought: Would it not be excessive on his part, would it not be familiar, would he not be descending beneath his importance? On account of such reasoning, he remained eternally in the same silent state, only uttering some monosyllabic sounds from time to time, and in this way he acquired the title of a most boring person. It was to this important person that our Akaky Akakievich came, and came at a most unfavorable moment, very inopportune for himself, though very opportune for the important person.

The important person was in his office and was talking away very, very merrily with a recently arrived old acquaintance and childhood friend, whom he had not seen for several years. Just then it was announced to him that a certain Bashrnachkin was there. "Who's that?" he asked curtly. "Some clerk," came the reply. "Ah! he can wait, now isn't a good time," said the important man. Here it should be said that the important man was stretching it a bit: the time was good, he had long since discussed everything with his friend and their conversation had long since been interspersed with lengthy silences, while they patted each other lightly on the thigh, saying: "So there, Ivan Abramovich!" "So it is, Stepan Varlamovich!" But, for all that, he nevertheless told the clerk to wait, in order to show his friend, a man who had not been in the service and had been living for a long time on his country estate, what lengths of time clerks spent waiting in his anteroom. At last, having talked, or, rather, been silent his fill, and having smoked a cigar in an easy chair with a reclining back, at last he suddenly recollected, as it were, and said to his secretary, who stood in the doorway with papers for a report, "Ah, yes, it seems there's a clerk standing there. Tell him he may come in." Seeing Akaky Akakievich's humble look and his old uniform, he turned to him suddenly and said, "What can I do for you?" in a voice abrupt and firm, which he had purposely studied beforehand in his room, alone and in front of a mirror, a week prior to receiving his present post and the rank of general. Akaky Akakievich, who had been feeling the appropriate timidity for a good while already, became somewhat flustered and explained as well as he could, so far as the freedom of his tongue permitted, adding the words "sort of" even more often than at other times, that the overcoat was perfectly new and he had been robbed in a brutal fashion, and that he was addressing him so that through his intercession, as it were, he could sort of write to the gentleman police superintendent or someone else and find the overcoat. For some reason, the general took this to be familiar treatment.

"What, my dear sir?" he continued curtly. "Do you not know the order? What are you doing here? Do you not know how cases are conducted? You ought to have filed a petition about it in the chancellery; it would pass to the chief clerk, to the section chief, then be conveyed to my secretary, and my secretary would deliver it to me…"

"But, Your Excellency," said Akaky Akakievich, trying to collect the handful of presence of mind he had and feeling at the same time that he was sweating terribly, "I made so bold as to trouble you, Your Excellency, because secretaries are, sort of… unreliable folk…"

"What, what, what?" said the important person. "Where did you pick up such a spirit? Where did you pick up such ideas? What is this rebelliousness spreading among the young against their chiefs and higher-ups!"

The important person seemed not to notice that Akaky Akakievich was already pushing fifty. And so, even if he might be called a young man, it was only relatively-that is, in relation to someone who was seventy years old.

"Do you know to whom you are saying this? Do you realize who is standing before you? Do you realize that? Do you realize, I ask you?"

Here he stamped his foot, raising his voice to such a forceful note that even someone other than Akaky Akakievich would have been frightened by it. Akaky Akakievich was simply stricken, he swayed, shook all over, and was quite unable to stand: if the caretakers had not come running at once to support him, he would have dropped to the floor. He was carried out almost motionless. And the important person, pleased that the effect had even surpassed his expectations, and thoroughly delighted by the thought that his word could even make a man faint, gave his friend a sidelong glance to find out how he had taken it all, and saw, not without satisfaction, that his friend was in a most uncertain state and was even, for his own part, beginning to feel frightened himself.

How he went down the stairs, how he got outside, nothing of that could Akaky Akakievich remember. He could not feel his legs or arms. Never in his life had he been given such a bad roasting by a general, and not his own general at that. He walked, his mouth gaping, through the blizzard that whistled down the streets, blowing him off the sidewalk; the wind, as always in Petersburg, blasted him from all four sides out of every alley. He instantly caught a quinsy, and he reached home unable to utter a word; he was all swollen and took to his bed. So strong at times is the effect of a proper roasting! The next day he was found to be in a high fever. Owing to the generous assistance of the Petersburg climate, the illness developed more quickly than might have been expected, and when the doctor came, after feeling his pulse, he found nothing else to do but prescribe a poultice, only so as not to leave the sick man without the beneficent aid of medical science; but he nevertheless declared straight off that within a day and a half it would inevitably be kaput for him. After which he turned to the landlady and said, "And you, dearie, don't waste any time, order him a pine coffin at once, because an oak one will be too expensive for him." Whether Akaky Akakievich heard these fatal words spoken, and, if he heard them, whether they made a tremendous effect on him, whether he regretted his wretched life-none of this is known, because he was in fever and delirium the whole time. Visions, one stranger than another, kept coming to him: first he saw Petrovich and ordered him to make an overcoat with some sort of snares for thieves, whom he kept imagining under the bed, and he even called the landlady every other minute to get one thief out from under his blanket; then he asked why his old housecoat was hanging before him, since he had a new overcoat; then he imagined that he was standing before the general, listening to the proper roasting, and kept murmuring, "I'm sorry, Your Excellency!"- then, finally, he even blasphemed, uttering the most dreadful words, so that his old landlady even crossed herself, never having heard anything like it from him, the more so as these words immediately followed the words "Your Excellency." After that he talked complete gibberish, so that it was impossible to understand anything; one could only see that his disorderly words and thoughts turned around one and the same overcoat. At last poor Akaky Akakievich gave up the ghost. Neither his room nor his belongings were sealed, because, first, there were no heirs, and, second, there was very little inheritance left-namely, a bunch of goose quills, a stack of white official paper, three pairs of socks, two or three buttons torn off of trousers, and the housecoat already familiar to the reader. To whom all this went, God knows: that, I confess, did not even interest the narrator of this story. Akaky Akakievich was taken away and buried. And Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakievich, as if he had never been there. Vanished and gone was the being, protected by no one, dear to no one, interesting to no one, who had not even attracted the attention of a naturalist- who does not fail to stick a pin through a common fly and examine it under a microscope; a being who humbly endured office mockery and went to his grave for no particular reason, but for whom, all the same, though at the very end of his life, there had flashed a bright visitor in the form of an overcoat, animating for an instant his poor life, and upon whom disaster then fell as unbearably as it falls upon the kings and rulers of this world… Several days after his death, a caretaker was sent to his apartment from the office with an order for him to appear immediately-the chief demanded it. But the caretaker had to return with nothing, reporting that the clerk could come no more, and to the question "Why?" expressed himself with the words: "It's just that he's already dead, buried three days ago…" Thus they learned at the office about the death of Akaky Akakievich, and by the next day a new clerk was sitting in his place, a much taller one, who wrote his letters not in a straight hand but much more obliquely and slantwise.

But who could imagine that this was not yet all for Akaky Akakievich, that he was fated to live noisily for a few days after his death, as if in reward for his entirely unnoticed life? Yet so it happened, and our poor story unexpectedly acquires a fantastic ending. The rumor suddenly spread through Petersburg that around the Kalinkin Bridge and far further a dead man had begun to appear at night in the form of a clerk searching for some stolen overcoat and, under the pretext of this stolen overcoat, pulling from all shoulders, regardless of rank or title, various overcoats: with cat, with beaver, with cotton quilting, raccoon, fox, bearskin coats-in short, every sort of pelt and hide people have thought up for covering their own. One of the clerks from the office saw the dead man with his own eyes and recognized him at once as Akaky Akakievich; this instilled such fear in him, however, that he ran away as fast as his legs would carry him and thus could not take a good look, but only saw from far off how the man shook his finger at him. From all sides came ceaseless complaints that the backs and shoulders-oh, not only of titular, but even of privy councillors themselves, were completely subject to chills on account of this nocturnal tearing off of overcoats. An order was issued for the police to catch the dead man at all costs, dead or alive, and punish him in the harshest manner, as an example to others, and in this they nearly succeeded. Namely, a neighborhood policeman on duty had already quite seized the dead man by the collar in Kir- iushkin Lane, catching him red-handed in an attempt to pull a frieze overcoat off some retired musician who had whistled on a flute in his day. Having seized him by the collar, he shouted and summoned his two colleagues, whom he charged with holding him while he went to his boot just for a moment to pull out his snuffbox, so as to give temporary refreshment to his nose, frostbitten six times in his life. But the snuff must have been of a kind that even a dead man couldn't stand. The policeman had no sooner closed his right nostril with his finger, while drawing in half a handful with the left, than the dead man sneezed so hard that he completely bespattered the eyes of all three of them. While they tried to rub them with their fists, the dead man vanished without a trace, so that they did not even know whether or not they had indeed laid hands on him. After that, on-duty policemen got so afraid of dead men that they grew wary of seizing living ones and only shouted from far off: "Hey, you, on your way!" and the dead clerk began to appear even beyond the Kalinkin Bridge, instilling no little fear in all timorous people.

We, however, have completely abandoned the certain important person, who in fact all but caused the fantastic turn taken by this, incidentally perfectly true, story. First of all, justice demands that we say of this certain important person that, soon after the departure of the poor, roasted-to-ashes Akaky Akakievich, he felt something akin to regret. He was no stranger to compassion: his heart was open to many good impulses, though his rank often prevented their manifestation. As soon as his out-of-town friend left his office, he even fell to thinking about poor Akaky Akakievich. And after that, almost every day he pictured to himself the pale Akaky Akakievich, unable to endure his superior's roasting. He was so troubled by the thought of him that a week later he even decided to send a clerk to him, to find out about him and whether he might indeed somehow help him; and when he was informed that Akaky Akakievich had died unexpectedly of a fever, he was even struck, felt remorse of conscience, and was in low spirits the whole day. Wishing to divert himself somehow and forget the unpleasant impression, he went for the evening to one of his friends, where he found a sizable company, and, best of all, everyone there was of nearly the same rank, so that he felt no constraint whatsoever. This had a surprising effect on his state of mind. He grew expansive, became pleasant in conversation, amiable-in short, he spent the evening very pleasantly. At supper he drank two glasses of champagne-an agent known to have a good effect with regard to gaiety. The champagne disposed him toward various extravagances; to wit: he decided not to go home yet, but to stop and see a lady of his acquaintance, Karolina Ivanovna, a lady of German origin, it seems, toward whom he felt perfectly friendly relations. It should be said that the important person was a man no longer young, a good husband, a respectable father of a family. Two sons, one of whom already served in the chancellery, and a comely sixteen-year-old daughter with a slightly upturned but pretty little nose, came every day to kiss his hand, saying, "Bonjour, papa." His wife, still a fresh woman and not at all bad looking, first gave him her hand to kiss and then, turning it over, kissed his hand. Yet the important person, perfectly satisfied, incidentally, with domestic family tendernesses, found it suitable to have a lady for friendly relations in another part of the city. This lady friend was no whit better or younger than his wife; but there exist such riddles in the world, and it is not our business to judge of them. And so, the important person went downstairs, got into his sleigh, and said to the driver, "To Karolina Ivanovna's," and, himself wrapped quite luxuriantly in a warm overcoat, remained in that pleasant state than which no better could be invented for a Russian man, when you are not thinking of anything and yet thoughts come into your head by themselves, each more pleasant than the last, without even causing you the trouble of chasing after and finding them. Filled with satisfaction, he kept recalling all the gay moments of that evening, all his words that had made the small circle laugh; he even repeated many of them in a half whisper and found them as funny as before, and therefore it was no wonder that he himself chuckled heartily. Occasionally, however, a gusty wind interfered with him, suddenly bursting from God knows where and for no apparent reason, cutting at his face, throwing lumps of snow into it, hoisting the collar of his coat like a sail, or suddenly, with supernatural force, throwing it over his head, thereby causing him the eternal trouble of extricating himself from it. Suddenly the important person felt someone seize him quite firmly by the collar. Turning around, he noticed a short man in an old, worn-out uniform, in whom, not without horror, he recognized Akaky Akakievich. The clerk's face was pale as snow and looked exactly like a dead man's. But the important person's horror exceeded all bounds when he saw the dead man's mouth twist and, with the horrible breath of the tomb, utter the following words: "Ah! here you are at last! At last I've sort of got you by the collar! It's your overcoat I need! You didn't solicit about mine, and roasted me besides-now give me yours!" The poor important person nearly died. However full of character he was in the chancellery and generally before subordinates, and though at a mere glance at his manly appearance and figure everyone said, "Oh, what character!"-here, like a great many of those who are powerful in appearance, he felt such fear that he even became apprehensive, not without reason, of some morbid fit. He quickly threw the overcoat off his shoulders and shouted to the driver in a voice not his own, "Home at top speed!" The driver, hearing a voice that was usually employed at decisive moments and even accompanied by something much more effective, drew his head between his shoulders just in case, swung his knout, and shot off like an arrow. In a little over six minutes the important person was already at the door of his house. Pale, frightened, and minus his overcoat, he came to his own place instead of Karolina Ivanovna's, plodded to his room somehow or other, and spent the night in great disorder, so that the next morning over tea his daughter told him directly, "You're very pale today, papa." But papa was silent-not a word to anyone about what had happened to him, or where he had been, or where he had wanted to go.

This incident made a strong impression on him. He even began to say "How dare you, do you realize who is before you?" far less often to his subordinates; and if he did say it, it was not without first listening to what the matter was. But still more remarkable was that thereafter the appearances of the dead clerk ceased altogether: evidently the general's overcoat fitted him perfectly; at least there was no more talk about anyone having his overcoat torn off. However, many active and concerned people refused to calm down and kept saying that the dead clerk still appeared in the more remote parts of the city. And, indeed, one policeman in Kolomna saw with his own eyes a phantom appear from behind a house; but, being somewhat weak by nature, so that once an ordinary adult pig rushing out of someone's private house had knocked him down, to the great amusement of the coachmen standing around, for which jeering he extorted a half kopeck from each of them to buy snuff-so, being weak, he did not dare to stop it, but just followed it in the darkness, until the phantom suddenly turned around, stopped, and asked, "What do you want?" and shook such a fist at him as is not to be found even among the living. The policeman said, "Nothing," and at once turned to go back. The phantom, however, was much taller now, had an enormous mustache, and, apparently making its way toward the Obukhov Bridge, vanished completely into the darkness of the night.

NOTES

UKRAINIAN TALES

St. John's Eve 1. The Russian and Ukrainian stove was a large, elaborate structure used for heating and cooking, which one could also sit or sleep on and even get into in order to wash.

2. The names of three half-legendary heroes from Ukrainian history: Ivan Podkova was a Cossack leader who seized the Moldavian throne in 1578 and was later executed by the Polish king; Karp Poltora Kozhukha was hetman of the Ukraine from 1638 to 1642; Sagaidachny (Pyotr Konashevich), also a Ukrainian hetman, led Cossack campaigns against the Turks and Tartars in 1616-21.

3. A Ukrainian saying, meaning to lie at confession, as Gogol himself explains in a note to the story.

4. The Poles and Lithuanians, whose territories bordered the Ukraine, were traditional enemies of the Cossacks, though they sometimes made alliances with each other against common enemies. The narrator refers to them in somewhat familiar, disrespectful terms. "Crimeans" here refers to the Crimean Tartars, a Muslim people inhabiting the Crimean peninsula, descendants of the Mongols.

5. Kutya (pronounced koot-YAH) is a special dish made from rice (or barley or wheat) and raisins, sweetened with honey, offered to people after a church service in commemoration of the dead and sometimes also on Christmas Eve.

6. Father Afanasy represents an exaggeration of the view of Roman Catholics (such as Poles and Lithuanians) taken by the Ukrainians, who belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

7. The Zaporozhye (meaning "beyond the rapids" on the Dnieper River) was a territory in the southeastern Ukraine where the Cossacks lived and pre- served some measure of independence from the Russian state during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

8. The Cossacks customarily shaved their heads but grew a topknot on the top of the head, priding themselves on its length.

9. That is, the feast in honor of the nativity of Saint John the Baptist, celebrated on June 24; in folklore the night before the feast is a time of magic and mystification.

10. "Yaga" is the second half of the name Baba-yaga, the wicked witch of Russian folktales, here used generically.

11. A Ukrainian folk dance and the music for it.

12. Probably a slighting reference to the Jews, who often kept taverns in the Ukraine.

The Night Before Christmas

1. See note 5 to "St. John's Eve."

2. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."

3. The period of fast preceding the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29.

4. A panikhida is an Orthodox prayer service in memory of the dead.

5. A Zaporozhets was a Cossack from the Zaporozhye (see note 7 to "St. John's Eve").

6. The only food permitted on the last day of the Advent fast (i.e., Christmas Eve).

7. The Setch was the sociopolitical and military organization of the Ukrainian Cossacks in the Zaporozhye-a form of republic headed by a chief. The freedoms of the Setch were gradually curtailed in the eighteenth century, and in 1775 it was finally abolished.

8. The term hetman (from the German Hauptmann) originally referred to the commander in chief of the Polish army. The Cossacks used it as the title of their own elected chief. It is comically misapplied here.

9. Grigory Alexandrovich, Prince Potemkin (1739-91), field marshal and statesman, in 1774 became the favorite of the empress Catherine II (1729-96) and thereafter guided Russian state policy.

10. The Italian carabinieri were members of an army corps also used as a police force-a degrading function in the opinion of the Cossacks.

11. On "Crimeans" see note 4 to "St. John's Eve." The allusion is to the Russian conquest of the Crimea from the Turks in 1771.

12. The empress is addressing the dramatist Denis Fonvizin (1745-92), whose plays The Brigadier and The Minor are classics of the Russian theater and the best Russian prose comedies before Gogol's own Inspector General.

13. Jean de La Fontaine (1621-95), the great French poet and fabulist.

14. The iconostasis is an icon-bearing partition with three doors that spans the width of an Orthodox church, separating the sanctuary from the body of the church.

The Terrible Vengeance 1. See note 5 to "The Night Before Christmas."

2. Ksiedzy is the plural of ksiadz, Polish for priest; adopted by Russian, the word acquired pejorative connotations as referring to Roman Catholic priests (see note 6 to "St. John s Eve"). Rebaptizing implied that the priests did not consider the Orthodox Ukrainians to be Christians.

3. The Zaporozhtsy under the leadership of Sagaidachny (see note 2 to "St. John's Eve") campaigned against the Crimean Tartar khanate, remnant of the Golden Horde of the Mongols, and fought them on the shore of the Sivash (the "Salt Lake") in 1620.

4. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."

5. The Uniates are adherents of the so-called Union of Brest (Unia in Latin), declared at the church council at Brest in 1595, by which western Russian churches were placed under the jurisdiction of the pope of Rome, with the understanding that, while accepting the dogmas of Roman Catholicism, they would retain the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Unia aroused great dissension at the time, and has been a cause of struggle in the Ukraine and elsewhere to this day.

6. The Pospolitstvo was the combined nobility of Poland and Lithuania, united under one scepter in 1569.

7. See note 8 to "The Night Before Christmas."

8. The enemy of Christ whose appearance in the "last days" is prophesied in Revelation (11:7), and of whom Saint John writes in his first epistle: "… and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come…" (1 John 2:18).

9. See note 4 to "The Night Before Christmas." It is a popular belief that the soul does not leave this world until forty days after death.

10. See note 2 to "St. John's Eve" and note 3 above.

11. See footnote (author's note) on p. 15.

12. The Liman (an inlet of the Black Sea near Odessa) and the Crimea are in the very south of the Ukraine, as far as possible from Kiev; Galicia, extending to the northern slopes of the Carpathians, is now divided between the western Ukraine and eastern Poland; geographically, it is to the right, not the left, looking south from Kiev.

13. See note 10 above. Bogdan Khmelnitsky (1593-1657), hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, rose up against the Poles in 1648.

14. That is, Stefan Batory, a Hungarian prince who was king of Poland from 1575 to 1586.

Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt

1. Pirozhki (plural of pirozhok) are small pastries with sweet or savory fillings.

2. A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee.

3. Latin for "knows," meaning that the student has learned the lesson.

4. A concentrate produced by allowing wine to freeze and then removing the frozen portion.

5. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."

6. Adult male serfs were known in Russia as "souls." Censuses for tax purposes were taken at intervals of as much as fifteen years, between which the number of souls on an estate might of course increase (or decrease).

7. The feast of Saint Philip falls on November 14 and marks the beginning of the Advent fast.

8. A book entitled The Journey of Trifon Korobeinikov, an account written by the Moscow clerk Trifon Korobeinikov of his journey to Mount Athos with a mission sent by the tsar Ivan IV ("the Terrible"). First published in the eighteenth century, it went through forty editions, testifying to its immense popularity. Korobeinikov also wrote Description of the Route from Moscow to Constantinople after a second journey in 1594.

Old World Landowners

1. Mythological symbol of conjugal love, Philemon and Baucis were a Phrygian couple who welcomed Zeus and Hermes, traveling in disguise, when their compatriots refused them hospitality. In return, they were spared the flood that the divinities sent the Phrygians as a punishment. Their thatched cottage became a temple in which they ministered, and they asked that one of them not die without the other. In old age they were changed into trees.

2. Ukrainian (Little Russian) names frequently end in 0, which would be Russified by the addition of a v.

3. Peter III (1728-62) became emperor of Russia in 1762 and was assassinated at the instigation of his wife, the empress Catherine II, who thereafter ruled alone.

4. Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, Duchess of La Valliere (1644-1710), was a favorite of Louis XIV. She ended her life as a Carmelite nun.

5. A volunteer defense force in the Ukraine during the war with Napoleon in 1812.

6. See note 1 to "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt."

7. A dish made from grain (wheat, buckwheat, oats, rye, millet) boiled with water or milk.

8. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."

9. The armies of Catherine II fought successfully against the Turks in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

10. It was customary in Russia to lay a dead person out on a table until the coffin was prepared.

11. See note 5 to "St. John's Eve."

12. The final hymn of the Orthodox funeral service.

13- "Small open," a French card-playing term.

14. Patties of cottage cheese mixed with flour and eggs and fried.

Viy

1. Russian seminary education was open to the lower classes and was often subsidized by state scholarships; seminarians were thus not necessarily preparing for the priesthood.

2. Herodias, wife of Herod the tetrarch and mother of Salome, ordered the beheading of John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1-11); Potiphar, an officer of the Egyptian pharaoh, bought Joseph as a slave and made him overseer of his house; his wife falsely accused Joseph of trying to lie with her (Genesis 39).

3. See note 7 to "Old World Landowners."

4. See note 8 to "St. John's Eve."

5. Earlier of the two summer fasts (see note 3 to "The Night Before Christmas").

6. "Master" in Latin.

7. Thus in the original. The French bon mot means a clever or witty saying.

8. See note 14 to "The Night Before Christmas."

9. See note 4 to "The Night Before Christmas."

The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich

1. A word of Hungarian origin meaning a frock coat, caftan, or jacket lined with fur.

2. A Tartar word referring, in different regions, to different sorts of jackets- here, probably a simple caftan trimmed with leather on the hem, cuffs, and front.

3. Moscow printers and publishers of the early nineteenth century.

4. In Russian, the godfather and godmother of the same person call each other kum and kuma, as do all others thus related through the same baptism.

5. A zertsalo was a small three-faced glass pyramid bearing an eagle and certain edicts of the emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725) that stood on the desk in every government office.

6. A special dorsal section of flesh running the entire length of a salmon or sturgeon, removed in one piece and either salted or smoked; considered a great delicacy in Russia.

7. The fourth-century saints Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom, sometimes venerated together by the Orthodox Church.

8. St. Philips Day marks the beginning of the six-week Advent fast (see note 7 to "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt").

9. In chapter I his last name is Pupopuz, meaning something like "bellybut-ton." Golopuz means "bare belly."

10. See note 14 to "Old World Landowners."

PETERSBURG TALES

Nevsky Prospect 1. The Neva River divides into three main branches as it flows into the Gulf of Finland, marking out the three main areas of the city of St. Petersburg: on the left bank of the Neva is the city center; between the Neva and the Little Neva is Vasilievsky Island; and between the Little Neva and the Nevka is the Petersburg side. The Vyborg side, Peski ("the Sands") and the Moscow gate, neighborhoods well within the limits of present-day Petersburg, were once quite remote from each other.

2. Ganymede, the son of King Tros, after whom the city of Troy was named, was the most beautiful of young men and was therefore chosen by the gods to be Zeus's cupbearer.

3. An extremely tall, needle-shaped spire topped by a figure of a ship on the Admiralty building, one of the landmarks of Petersburg.

4. The reference is to the image of the Madonna in the fresco The Adoration of the Magi, in the chapel of Santa Maria dei Bianchi in Citta della Pieve, painted by the Italian master Pietro Vannucci, called II Perugino (1446-1523).

5. The star figured on the decoration of a number of Russian military and civil orders.

6. The cemetery in Okhta, a suburb of Petersburg on a small tributary of the Neva.

7. An amusingly ironic assortment of names: F. V. Bulgarin (1789-1859) and N. I. Grech (1787-1867), journalists and minor writers of much influence in their time, were editors of the reactionary and semiofficial magazine The Northern Bee, and at least one of them (Bulgarin) was also a police informer. They were archenemies of Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), who enjoyed mocking them in epigrams. A. A. Orlov (1791-1840) was the author of primitive, moralistic novels for 'a popular audience, derided by Bulgarin and Grech, though, as Pushkin pointed out in an article, Bulgarin's novels differed little from Orlov's.

8. The reference is to vaudevilles about simple folk popular in the 1830s, featuring a character named Filatka.

9. Dmitri Donskoy is a historical tragedy by the mediocre poet Nestor Kukol-nik (1809-68), a great success in its day. Woe from Wit, a comedy in verse by Alexander Griboedov (1795-1829), stands as the first real masterpiece of the Russian theater.

10. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), poet, playwright, historian, and literary theorist, is one of the greatest figures of German literature. The fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) are known the world over.

11. In Russian, the German word Junker, meaning "young lord," refers to a lower officer's rank open only to the nobility (and thus, of course, not to the tinsmith Schiller).

12. A junior clerk was expected to call at his superior's home to wish him good health on his name day and feast days, and to leave his card as evidence of having done so.

13. Marie-Joseph, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), French general and statesman, took the side of the Colonies in the American war of independence, and was active as a liberal royalist in the French revolutions of 1789 and 1830.

The Diary of a Madman

1. See note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect."

2. The lines are in fact by the minor poet and playwright N. P. Nikolev (1758-1815).

3. Ruch was a prominent Moscow tailor of the time.

4. See note 8 to "Nevsky Prospect."

5. The German title Kammerjunker ("gentleman of the bedchamber") was adopted by the Russian imperial court.

6. The reference is to the problem of royal succession in Spain following the death of Ferdinand VII in 1833. His three-year-old daughter, Isabella II, was put on the throne and ruled for thirty-five years, despite the efforts of the king's brother, Don Carlos, to depose her.

7. Under the stern and very Catholic Philip II (1527-98), the Inquisition reached its height in Spain. The Capuchins were Franciscan friars of the new rule established in 1528.

8. Jules-Armand, Prince de Polignac (1780-1847), French politican, was minister of foreign affairs under Charles X (1757-1836).

The Nose

1. In the first version of the story, the date was April 25th. The date Gogol finally chose, March 25th, is that of the feast of the Annunciation, one of the major feasts in the Christian calendar. This fact has seemed to support commentators seeking a specifically religious and even apocalyptical significance in "The Nose."

2. Bribery and other administrative abuses evidently worked more quickly in the Caucasus than in the capital or the Russian provinces.

3. See note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect."

4. The denominations of Russian paper currency were distinguished by color: a blue banknote had a value of five roubles, a red of ten roubles.

5. Gogol's slip, perpetuated in all Russian editions; her name is, of course, Palageya.

6. A fashionable shop in Petersburg, located on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Bolshaya Morskaya Street.

7. Grand admiral and later grand vizier of the Ottoman empire under the sultan Mahmud II (1785-1839), Khozrev-Mirza came to Petersburg in August 1829 at the head of a special embassy, following the murder in Teheran of the Russian ambassador, the poet Alexander Griboedov (see note 9 to "Nevsky Prospect"). During his stay, he lived in the Tavrichesky Palace.

The Carriage

1. Marshal of the nobility was the highest elective office in a province before the reforms of the 1860s. Governors and administrators were appointed by the tsar.

2. That is, in the war against Napoleon.

The Portrait

1. See note 7 to "The Nose."

2. A character from the popular story "Bova Korolevich," often portrayed in Russian folk prints, or lubok, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

3. That is, from the outskirts of the city (see note 6 to "Nevsky Prospect").

4. Yeruslan Lazarevich is a Russian version of the Rustem of Persian tales; he and the other folk figures listed here were also popular images in lubok.

5. The streets on Vasilievsky Island (see note 1 to "Nevsky Prospect"), called "lines," were laid out in a grid and numbered.

6. Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520), who worked in Perugia, Florence, and Rome, was commonly considered the greatest of all painters by Russians of Gogol's time; Guido Reni (1575-1642) was known for the elegance of his brushwork, the correctness of his drawing, and the brilliance of his colors; Titian (1477-1576) was perhaps the greatest of the Venetian masters. For Russians, the Flemish school was represented by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Antoine (or Sir Anthony) van Dyck (1599-1641), who collaborated with Rubens for some time and later became court painter for Charles I of England.

7. Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), painter and architect, a pupil of Michelangelo, is best known for his Lives of the Italian artists of the Renaissance. The portrait in question is Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

8. See note 1 to "Nevsky Prospect." Kolomna was a suburb to the west of Petersburg.

9. Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, prince of Smolensk (1745-1813), Russian field marshal, led campaigns in Poland, Turkey, and the Crimea, was defeated by Napoleon at Austerlitz, and successfully commanded the Russian army during Napoleon's disastrous Russian expedition of 1812.

10. A hero of the narrative poem Twelve Sleeping Maidens, by V. A. Zhukovsky (1783-1852), Gromoboy sold his soul to the devil.

11. Either David Teniers the Elder (1582-1649), or his son, David Teniers the Younger (1610-90), Flemish painters known for their realistic scenes of popular life, interiors, and so on.

12. The lady uses the French form of the name of the Italian painter Antonio

Allegri da Correggio (1494-1534), known for his audacious use of aerial perspective and the sensuality of his mythological scenes.

13. The typical Byronic pose is a full profile with an open-collared shirt. Corinne is the heroine of a novel of the same name by the French writer Mme. de Stael (1766-1817); Ondine is the heroine of a poem of the same name by V. A. Zhukovsky, based on the tale by the German Romantic writer Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque (1777-1843); Aspasia (fifth century B.C.), an Athenian courtesan famous for her beauty and intelligence, belonged to Socrates' circle and was the lover of the general and statesman Pericles.

14. The basilisk is a legendary monster, hatched by a toad from a cock's egg, whose look is said to kill.

15. The reference is to the poem "The Demon" (1824), by Alexander Pushkin (see note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect").

16. The words "immersed in their zephyrs and cupids" are paraphrased from a line about a ruined landowner and lover of ballet in Griboedov's Woe from Wit (see note 9 to "Nevsky Prospect"); the name of Gaius Maecenas (c. 70-8 B.C.), Roman statesman and important patron of literature, has become proverbial.

17. A shopping place that still exists in Petersburg.

18. A special design of oil lamp with a double draft and a reservoir higher than the wick, named for its French inventor.

19. See note 4 to "The Night Before Christmas."

20. The Senate in Petersburg acted as a civil court as well as a legislative body.

21. The noble and virtuous hero of The History of Sir Charles Grandison (I753-54). by Samuel Richardson (1689-1761).

The Overcoat

1. See note 20 to "The Portrait."

2. That is, the church calendar, which lists saints' days and feast days, among other things; a child would be named for the saint (or one of the saints) on whose day it was born.

3. The famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great on the Senate square in Petersburg, by French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet (1716-91).

4. That is, one whose neglect of Orthodox feast days made her comparable to an unbeliever and even a sober Lutheran.

Table of Contents

THE COLLECTED TALES OF NIKOLAI GOGOL

RICHARD PEVEAR

LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

PREFACE

TRANSLATORS' NOTE

Chancellor

II

III

VI

VII

IX

XI

XIII

I

II

III

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

PETERSBURG TALES

II

III

PART II

NOTES

3. See note 7 to "Old World Landowners."

PETERSBURG TALES

1. See note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect."

3. See note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect."

1. See note 20 to "The Portrait."