«... “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” In these moving words, other words resounded—“I am thy brother.”» ~ «... how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed beneath delicate, refined worldliness, and even, O God! in that man whom the world acknowledges as honourable and noble.» ~ «In Holy Russia all is thus contaminated with the love of imitation; every man imitates and copies his superior...» ~ [All of the quotations were taken from Constance Garnett's English translation] ~ #Finished: #TheOvercoat (also translated as #TheCloak and #TheMantle) by #NikolaiGogol. • Rating: 9/10 • The narrator begins his #story hinting it is a critical one and may offend the officials, whom he calls irritable, so he says he is cautious not to give particulars. Hardworking, humble yet unsociable and alienated, #AkakiyAkakievitchBashmachkin is a titular councillor (a lower rank of civil officers in Imperial Russia) who copies documents, and is bullied even by his younger co-workers and inferiors. His often-mocked #overcoat has been too worn and ragged to be mended, so he needs to have a new one made, and to save money, he must live within a strict budget. He eventually buys the new overcoat, and starts to be admired but shortly afterwards gets very unfortunate... The mostly-realistic story ends with surreal events, which feel grotesque and absurd, making the story quite an interesting one. This one is a satirical, bitter criticism of bureaucracy in the Tsarist Russia, a corrupt system full of obsequiousness, discrimination, vanity, favoritism and unfair promotion, in which the weak and the poor are insignificant and doomed to be crushed, but also indicates that those who are insignificant and abused may revenge upon those who are powerful or of higher social status. ~ «... there are such puzzles in the world, and it is not our place to judge them...» ~ «... But there is always a circle of people to whom what is insignificant in the eyes of others, is important enough...» ~ #Gogol #NikolayGogol #AkakyAkakievich #AkakiyAkakiyevich #Bashmachkin #russianliterature #book #books #bookstagram #literature #bibliophile #reading #read #bookworm #classics https://www.instagram.com/p/CINpewLAq1k/?igshid=flyn4rus8kn7
