“The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol: Dostoevsky, author of “The Double,” said he and other contemporary writers “all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ ”

Akaky Akakievich, who works copying documents in early 19th century St. Petersburg, desperately needs a warm winter coat (to commute to his copying job), which he cannot afford. But after he finally saves enough money and gets a new overcoat, he is robbed of it, and beaten, by thugs; humiliated by the authorities; and gets a fever and dies, all in the first twenty-five pages of this comic, then tragic, short story.

The final five pages are a ghost story. Two kinds of “ghosts” are seen in St. Petersburg. One kind looks like Akaky and takes people’s overcoats. The other kind is taller, and like the thugs, has moustaches.

Is this simply a supernatural twist at the end the story, with Akaky’s ghost taking his revenge, and the thugs’ turning out to have been other people’s ghosts?

My interpretation is that the “ghosts” represent alternate personalities of Akaky—and that the ones with mustaches were either other people’s alters or other alters of Akaky that wanted to mess him up—and that this has been a theme of the double, multiple personality, story, all along.

My reason is that the protagonist, Akaky, had been introduced and portrayed, not as a whole person with various interests and relationships, but as being so narrowly and exclusively devoted to copying documents that he was not like a real, whole person, but like Akaky’s document-copying alternate personality, who, since he was in control most of the time, had functioned as Akaky’s regular, host personality.

When Dostoevsky said, “We all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” I think he meant that “The Overcoat” (1842) was a double story (a multiple personality story) and preceded his own “The Double” (1846/1866).

1. Nikolai Gogol. “The Overcoat” [1842], pp. 115-145, in Nikolai Gogol’s Plays and Petersburg Tales. Trans. Christopher English. Oxford University Press, 1995/2008.