Point Books Supposing The Overcoat
| Original Title: | Шинель |
| ISBN: | 1419176528 (ISBN13: 9781419176524) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | St. Petersburg, Russia |
Nikolai Gogol
Paperback | Pages: 57 pages Rating: 4.14 | 24992 Users | 1719 Reviews
Interpretation Conducive To Books The Overcoat
It is a simple tale, on the surface. Akaky Akakievich (literally "Harmless Son-of-Harmless," but which might sound like "Poopy Pooperson” to a child), an impoverished civil servant and scrivener, must maintain his respectability by possessing a decent overcoat. How he gains a new overcoat, loses that overcoat, and seeks to have the overcoat restored to him constitutes the whole of our story. Dostoevsky has been quoted as saying, “We all come from under Gogol's Overcoat", and it is true that much of Russian literature can be glimpsed in this single short story: it is a satire ranging from buffonery to social commentary, a realist work rooted in naturalistic detail that sometimes descends to the grotesque and the surreal, and yet remains compassionate, maintaining its sympathy for all of us humans and our tragic and ludicrous plight. Not bad for a story slightly more than twelve thousand words in length. Which brings us to the distinctive characteristic of Gogol: he is a literary conjurer, with an extraordinary ability to shift from tone to tone. The Overcoat begins in low comedy, making fun of its character's name, then describes his shabby living conditions until we begin to see the dead flies and smell the onions. Gogol ridicules his protagonist's rigidity and pomposity, but then—when some younger clerks make fun of him—Gogol shifts his tone again until we grow to regard Akaky with an abiding compassion. From there, Gogol sharpens his social satire, tempering it with a comedy touched with pathos, and ends—not in tragedy, as we suspect it might, but—in nightmare and the supernatural. We'll let Nabokov have the last word. “[W]ith Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art... When, as in the immortal The Overcoat, he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.”
Particularize Out Of Books The Overcoat
| Title | : | The Overcoat |
| Author | : | Nikolai Gogol |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 57 pages |
| Published | : | June 30th 2004 by Kessinger Publishing (first published 1842) |
| Categories | : | Classics. Short Stories. Fiction. Cultural. Russia. Literature. Russian Literature |
Rating Out Of Books The Overcoat
Ratings: 4.14 From 24992 Users | 1719 ReviewsEvaluation Out Of Books The Overcoat
The Overcoat★★★★ 4 Engaging Stars!I first heard of this story while reading Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 fantastic novel The Namesake. Since then, I've been curious to read it and I finally had a chance to do it. (If you Google "The Namesake and The Overcoat", you'll find plenty of posts analyzing the connection between the two).The Overcoat follows the life and death of Akaky Akakievich, a middle-aged man, that works as a government clerk in St. Petersburg. Akaky, whose annual salary of 400 rublesPainstakingly beautiful.
In my preparation for reading The Metamorphosis, I did some background reading of critical analyses, including this one by Vladimir Nabokov (thanks to Cecily for the link!), where he does a fantastic dissection (heh) of The Metamorphosis but also talks about Gogol's "The Carrick" (aka "The Cloak" or "The Overcoat") and tosses off wonderful ideas like this:"The beauty of Kafka's and Gogol's private nightmares is that their central human characters belong to the same private fantastic world as the
Dostoyevsky's quoted: "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'." Many critics introduce this as the greatest story in the Russian language and a key work in the evolution of Russian literature toward realism. Personally I love Russian short stories than novels or plays, I've found they are only short in their length and stretched in every other aspect. The work has been interpreted variously as a story of social injustice, as tale of urban alienation and human isolation, as a love story with the
I absolutely love it ... Kamaszkin as a tragic character always moves me ...
To be able to criticize a system by only explaining the interaction of people with each other!..I wonder what Gogol would feel if he found out that nothing had changed after 200 years and that all the class differences had deepened. .Heavy as well as light, dramatic as well as comical, realistic as well as surrealistic, naturalistic and metaphysical, it is impossible to put a label on this narrative.But the possible emotional fluctuations of the reader -me- unmistakably and instinctively mean
My first contact with Gogol, and certainly not my last. This little book tells the story of Akakiy Akakievitch, a certain official in a certain department where nobody showed him any sign of respect. He was laughed at by his co-workers. That must be one of the worst thing that may happen to any human being: realizing that high school did not end (for a lot of people, it wasn't all flowers and rainbows). All the bullying, the bad jokes, the embarrassing moments that make you gently ask the ground
0 Comments