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Petersburg in search of a government job. At age 19 in 1828 he left his widowed mother on his family’s modest farm in the Ukraine and made the journey to St. Yet he was most strongly motivated, it seems, by his own search for spiritual meaning. Extremely sensitive to the opinions of others, he could be crushed by the slightest negative criticism and then swell with confidence from positive feedback. He was by all accounts a driven, moody individual. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol-Yanovski (who later dropped the second part of his hyphenated name) was born in Russia in 1809. Gogol’s story is both comic and horrific- at once a scathing social satire, moralistic fable, and psychological study. As the story progresses, we enter a fairy-tale world of supernatural revenge, where the clerk’s corpse is seen wandering city streets ripping coats off the backs of passersby. Petersburg where an awkward, impoverished clerk must scrimp and save in order to afford a badly needed new winter coat. The story begins by taking its readers through the mundane and alienating world of a bureaucratic office in St. “The Overcoat,” which was written sporadically over several years during a self-imposed exile in Geneva and Rome, is a particularly dazzling amalgam of these seemingly disparate tendencies in Gogol’s writing. Yet, Gogol viewed his work in a more conservative light, and his writing seems to incorporate as much fantasy and folklore as realistic detail. Progressive critics of his day praised Gogol for grounding his prose fictions in the everyday lives of ordinary people, and they claimed him as a pioneer of a new “naturalist” aesthetic. Gogol’s writings have been seen as a bridge between the genres of romanticism and realism in Russian literature. That either or both might have said it is an indication of the far-reaching significance of Gogol’s work. “We all came out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’” is a remark that has been variously attributed to Dostoevsky and Turgenev. The story is considered not only an early masterpiece of Russian Naturalism-a movement that would dominate the country’s literature for generations-but a progenitor of the modern short story form itself. One of the most influential short stories ever written, Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” ( “Shinel”) first appeared in 1842 as part of a four-volume publication of its author’s Collected Works (Sochinenya).