Petersburg Tales
€0,00
Collected in book form in 1842, Gogol’s Petersburg Tales brings together stories of clerks, artists and social outsiders navigating the strange machinery of imperial St Petersburg. Among its best-known tales are The Nose, in which a man’s nose acquires an independent social existence, and The Overcoat, the moving account of a low-ranking clerk whose modest hopes are bound up with a new garment.
Gogol transforms the everyday indignities of urban life into comedy that gradually becomes uncanny, exposing the cruelty of bureaucracy and the instability of personal identity. His mixture of the grotesque, the fantastic and the compassionate helped lay foundations for later Russian fiction. These stories reveal a city that is at once recognisable and dreamlike, where absurdity becomes a way of seeing social reality with unusual clarity.
From the book
“We all came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat.”
— Traditionally attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky; a famous comment on Gogol’s literary influence
On Petersburg Tales
“The Overcoat” is among the foundational works of Russian prose fiction.
— Literary critical tradition