In the Department… but it would be better not to name the Department. Nothing is more irascible than all sorts of departments, regiments, chancelleries, and, in short, all sorts of official estates. These days every individual person considers that if he is insulted, all of society is insulted in his person. They say that very recently an appeal was received from a certain chief of district police, I don’t remember in what town, in which he clearly stated that government decrees were crumbling and that his sacred name was being taken absolutely in vain. As proof of this, he attached to his petition an enormously lengthy volume of a work of Romantic literature in which a chief of district police appears every ten pages, sometimes in a quite drunken state. So, in order to avoid all kinds of unpleasantness, it will be best if we call the Department in which the affair took place a certain Department. So, in a certain Department there worked a certain civil servant; a civil servant who could not be said to be very remarkable; of short stature, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat reddish-haired, somewhat even weak-sighted by the look of him, with a small bald spot on his forehead, with wrinkles on both sides of his cheeks, and with a facial complexion of the sort that is called hemorrhoidal… What can you do! The St. Petersburg climate is to blame. As for his rank (because in Russia you have to announce the rank first of all), he was what they call an eternal titular councillor, about whom various writers have made jokes and witticisms to their heart’s content, those writers who have the commendable habit of oppressing people who can’t bite back.1
The civil servant’s last name was Bashmachkin. It is immediately apparent from this name that it was once derived from bashmak, meaning shoe; but when, at what time, and how it was derived from bashmak, nothing at all is known. His father, and his grandfather, and even his brother-in-law, and absolutely all the Bashmachkins wore boots, changing the soles only about three times a year.2 His name was Akaky Akakievich. Perhaps it seems somewhat strange and recherché, but we can assure the reader that no one searched for it at all, and that such circumstances happened all by themselves, that it was impossible to give him any other name, and this came about in the following way. Akaky Akakievich was born late on the night of March 23rd, if my memory does not deceive me. His deceased mother, the wife of a civil servant and a very good woman, was disposed to christen the child, as is appropriate. His mother was still lying on the bed opposite the door, and at her right side stood the godfather, a most excellent man, Ivan Ivanovich Yeroshkin, who served as a desk head in the Senate, and the godmother, the wife of a district police inspector, a woman of rare virtues, Arina Semyonovna Belobryushkova. The woman who had given birth was offered a choice of any of three names, whichever she wanted to choose: Mokkiya, Sossiya, or to call the child by the name of the martyr Khozdazat. “No,” the deceased woman thought, “these are all such names.” In order to oblige her, they opened up the Calendar of Saints to a different place; again, three names emerged: Trifily, Dula, and Varakhasy.3 “What did I do to deserve this,” the old woman said, “such names they all are; truly, I never heard such names before. If only it were Varadat or Varukh, but it’s Trifily and Varakhasy.” They turned another page—they got: Pavsikakhy and Vakhtisy. “Well, I see,” the old woman said, “that this must be his fate. If that’s the way it is, then let him be named the way his father was. His father was Akaky, so let the son be Akaky too.” And that is how Akaky Akakievich came about. The child was christened, and during the ceremony he started crying and made such a grimace that it seemed he had a premonition that he would be a titular councillor. So, that is how all this came about. We cited this so that the reader could see for himself that this happened by absolute necessity and that it was quite impossible to give him any other name.
When and at what time he started work in the Department and who had appointed him, no one could recall. No matter how many directors and all kinds of supervisors had changed places, he was seen always in the very same place, in the very same position, with the very same post, as the very same civil servant for scribal matters, so that later everyone became convinced that he had apparently been born into the world completely finished, wearing a civil service uniform and with a bald spot on his head. In the Department, no one showed him any respect. The guards not only didn’t get up from their seats when he went by, they didn’t even look at him, as if an ordinary fly had flown through the anteroom. The supervisors treated him in a kind of coldly despotic manner. Some assistant desk head would just stick some documents under his nose without even saying, “Copy them,” or “Here’s a nice, interesting little job,” or something pleasant, as is the habit in genteel places of work. And he would take it, looking only at the document, not looking to see who had put it under his nose and whether that person had the right to do so. He would take it and immediately settle down to copy it.
The young civil servants would laugh and make jokes at his expense, telling all sorts of stories they had made up about him, right in front of him; they would say that his landlady—an old woman seventy years of age—beat him, they would ask when their wedding was going to be, they would sprinkle bits of paper on his head, calling it snow. But Akaky Akakievich would not respond with a single word to this, as if there were no one standing before him. It didn’t even have an effect on his work: Amid all these annoyances he never made a single mistake in his writing. Only if the joke was too unbearable, when they would shove him under his arm, hindering him from doing his task, would he say: “Leave me alone, why do you offend me?” And something strange was contained in the words and in the voice in which they were uttered. In it one could hear something that inspired such compassion that one young man who had been recently appointed and who, following the example of the others, had permitted himself to laugh at him, suddenly stopped as if he had been pierced, and from that time it was as if everything had changed for him and appeared in a different form. A kind of unnatural force pushed him away from his comrades, who when he met them had appeared to be decent, urbane people. And for a long time afterward, in the middle of the happiest moments, a vision of the lowly civil servant with the bald spot on his forehead would rise before him, with his penetrating words: “Leave me alone, why do you offend me?”—and in those penetrating words other words rang out: “I am thy brother.” And the poor young man would cover his eyes with his hand, and many times in his life did he afterward shudder when he saw how much inhumanity there is in humanity, how much savage coarseness is hidden in refined, educated urbanity, and, my God! even in the person whom the world recognizes as noble and honorable…
It would hardly be possible to find a person who lived so thoroughly in his job. It’s not enough to say he served zealously—no, he served with love. In that copying he had a vision of his own multifarious and pleasant world. Delight was expressed on his face; some of the letters were his favorites, and when he got to them he was beside himself: He would laugh, and wink, and help out with his lips, so that it seemed you could read on his face every letter his pen was tracing. If they had given him recompense commensurate with his zeal, then to his own amazement he might even have ended up as a state councillor; but as his witty comrades put it, he had served long enough to earn a badge in his buttonhole and a hemorrhoid in his backside. One could not, however, say that no attention had been paid to him. One director, who was a kind man and wished to reward him for his long service, ordered them to give him something a little more important than ordinary copying; namely, he was ordered to take an already finished case and create a memorandum to another office. All he had to do was change the titular heading and change a few verbs from first person to third. This caused him so much effort that he was covered in sweat, he wiped his brow, and he finally said: “No, you’d better give me something to copy.” From that time, they left him to copy forevermore. Outside of this copying, it seemed that nothing existed for him. He didn’t think about his clothing at all: his uniform was not green but a kind of reddish-floury color. Its collar was narrow and low, so that his neck, despite the fact that it was not long, seemed to be unusually long as it extended out of his collar, like the necks on those plaster bobble-head kittens that whole dozens of Russian foreigners carry on their heads.4 And something was always getting stuck to his uniform, either a piece of straw or a little thread; furthermore, as he walked along the street, he had a particular knack of getting under a window at the precise time when someone was throwing all kinds of trash out of it, and so he was eternally bearing away on his hat watermelon rinds and melon rinds and that kind of rubbish. Not once in his life did he pay any attention to what was being done and what was happening every day on the street, the kind of thing that a person of his own profession, a young civil servant, always looks at, extending the perceptiveness of his bold gaze to the point that he will even notice that the foot strap has come loose on the trousers worn by someone on the other side of the pavement—which always brings a sly grin to his face.
But if Akaky Akakievich looked at anything, he saw on everything his own clean lines written out in his even handwriting, and only if a horse’s muzzle was placed on his shoulder and let a whole gust of wind blow from its nostrils onto his cheek, only then would he notice that he was not in the middle of a line but in the middle of the street. When he came home he would immediately sit down at the table, quickly slurp his cabbage soup and eat a piece of beef with onions without noticing any flavor at all, he would eat all this along with flies and anything else that God happened to send at that moment. When he noticed that his stomach was beginning to swell, he would get up from the table, take out a little bottle of ink, and copy documents that he had brought home. If he didn’t happen to have any, he would purposely make a copy for himself, for his own satisfaction, especially if the document was remarkable not for the beauty of the style but because of its being addressed to some new or important personage.
Even at those hours when the gray St. Petersburg sky is growing completely dim and the whole population of civil servants has eaten their fill and had dinner in whatever way they can manage, in conformity with the salary they receive and their own whims—when they have all taken a rest after the departmental scraping of quill pens, the running around, their own and other people’s necessary tasks, and all those things that fidgety people assign themselves voluntarily to do beyond what is necessary—when the civil servants hurry to devote their remaining time to enjoyment: an energetic one rushes off to the theater; another one goes out on the street, designating this time for inspecting little hats; another goes to a party, to waste the evening giving compliments to a comely young woman, the star of the little circle of civil servants; another, and this is what happens most often, simply goes to see another civil servant of his own sort who lives on a fourth or third floor, in two small rooms with an entryway or a kitchen and a few pretensions to fashion, a lamp or some other little object that cost many sacrifices, denials of dinners and outings—in short, even at that time when all the civil servants disperse among the little apartments of their friends to play a game of Sturmwhist, slurping tea out of glasses along with kopeck biscuits, inhaling smoke from their long pipes, recounting while the cards are being dealt some bit of gossip that has come flying in from high society, the kind of gossip that a Russian person can never resist, no matter what his station, or even, when there is nothing to talk about, retelling the eternal anecdote about the Fortress governor to whom it was reported that the tail of the horse on Falconet’s monument had been chopped off—in short, even at that time when everyone was striving to entertain themselves—Akaky Akakievich did not indulge in any entertainment.5 No one could say that they had ever seen him at an evening party. After he had written to his heart’s content, he would lie down to sleep, smiling in advance at the thought of the next day: What would God send him to copy tomorrow? Thus flowed by the peaceful life of a person who on a salary of four hundred knew how to be content with his lot, and it would have perhaps continued flowing to extreme old age, if there were not various calamities strewn about the life path not only of titular councillors, but even of privy, actual, court, and all other kinds of councillors, and even of those who neither give counsel nor receive it themselves.
There is in St. Petersburg a powerful enemy of all those who receive a salary of four hundred a year or thereabouts. That enemy is none other than our freezing northern weather—although they do say, however, that it is very healthy. Just after eight o’clock in the morning, that is, precisely at the time when the streets are covered by people going to the Department, it begins to give such powerful and stinging flicks to all noses indiscriminately, that the poor civil servants absolutely do not know where to put them. At that time when the foreheads of even those occupying high posts are hurting from the frost and tears are coming to their eyes, the poor titular councillors are sometimes defenseless. Their entire salvation consists in running as fast as they can in their pitifully thin overcoats across five or six streets and then stamping their feet for a good long while in the doorman’s room until all their capabilities and talents for the execution of their duties get thawed out. For some time Akaky Akakievich had begun to feel that he was getting a particularly strong burn in his back and shoulder, despite the fact that he tried to run as fast as he could across the lawful space. Finally, he wondered whether there might not be some faults in his overcoat. When he inspected it thoroughly at home, he discovered that in two or three places, namely on the back and shoulders, it had become nothing but cheesecloth. The cloth had become so worn out that you could see through it, and the lining was shredded. The reader should know that Akaky Akakievich’s overcoat was another subject of the civil servants’ ridicule. They even deprived it of the noble name of overcoat and called it a housecoat. In fact, it was strangely constructed: its collar got smaller and smaller every year, because it served to sharpen up the other parts of the coat. This sharpening up did not display the skill of the tailor and turned out pouchy and shabby.
When he saw what the problem was, Akaky Akakievich decided that he had to take the overcoat to Petrovich, a tailor who lived somewhere on the fourth floor up a back stairway, who despite having only one eye and being pockmarked all over his face had a rather successful business mending the pants and tailcoats of civil servants and all other sorts of people—when he was in a sober condition, needless to say, and was not nourishing some other enterprise in his head. We of course wouldn’t need to say much about this tailor, but since it’s been established that every character in a story has to be fully defined, we have no choice, let’s deal with Petrovich as well. At first, he was called simply Grigory and was a serf belonging to some nobleman. He started being called Petrovich from the time he received his manumission and began going on fairly serious drunken binges on every holiday, at first on the major ones, but later on all church holidays indiscriminately, whenever there was a little cross on the calendar. In this respect he was true to the customs of his grandfathers, and during arguments with his wife he would call her a worldly woman and a German. Since we’ve mentioned his wife, we also have to say a few words about her; but unfortunately not much was known about her, except perhaps that Petrovich had a wife, that she even wore a bonnet and not a kerchief, but it seems she could not boast of beauty. At least, only Guards soldiers would take a peep under her bonnet when they encountered her, then blink their mustaches and emit a peculiar vocal sound.
As he climbed the stairway to Petrovich’s place, which, to do it justice, was all anointed with water and slops and permeated through and through by that spirituous smell that stings the eyes and that as everyone knows is inevitably present on the back stairways of all St. Petersburg buildings—as he climbed the stairway, Akaky Akakievich was already thinking about how he would make his request to Petrovich and was mentally resolving not to offer more than two rubles. The door was open because the mistress of the house, while cooking some fish, had filled the kitchen with so much smoke that you couldn’t even see the cockroaches. Akaky Akakievich passed through the kitchen, unnoticed even by the mistress of the house, and finally entered a room where he saw Petrovich sitting on a broad, unpainted wooden table with his legs tucked up under him like a Turkish pasha. His feet, as is the custom of tailors when they are sitting at their work, were naked. The first thing that struck the eye was his big toe, very well known to Akaky Akakievich, with its mutilated toenail, as thick and strong as a turtle’s shell. A hank of silk and threads was hanging around Petrovich’s neck, and he had some ragged garment in his lap. He had been trying for about three minutes to put a thread through the eye of a needle. He kept missing, and so he was very angry at the darkness and even at the thread itself, as he growled under his breath: “She won’t go in, the barbarian; you’ve worn me out, you rascal!”
Akaky Akakievich was unhappy that he had come right at the moment that Petrovich was getting angry. He liked to order things from Petrovich when the latter had taken a bit of Dutch courage, or as his wife would put it, “he’s full of rotgut, the one-eyed devil.”6 In such a condition, Petrovich would usually be willing to come down on the price and be agreeable and would even bow and thank him every time. It’s true, his wife would come see him later, crying and saying that her husband had been drunk and that was why he had settled on too low a price, but all you had to do was throw in a ten-kopeck coin, and it was in the bag. Now, however, it seemed that Petrovich was in a sober condition, and so he was tough, disputatious, and ready to ask God knows what price. Akaky Akakievich realized this and was ready to beat a hasty retreat, as they say, but the business was already begun. Petrovich squinted at him very attentively with his single eye, and Akaky Akakievich involuntarily uttered: “Hello there, Petrovich!”
“I wish you good health, sir,” Petrovich said and looked askance with his one eye at Akaky Akakievich’s hands, wishing to catch sight of the booty he was carrying.
“So I’ve come to you, Petrovich, because, like…”
You must know that Akaky Akakievich expressed himself for the most part in prepositions, adverbs, and, finally, in those particles that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever. If it was a very delicate matter, then he even had the habit of not ending his sentences at all, so that very often, he would begin a speech with the words: “This is, truly, quite something that, like…”—and then there would be nothing more, and he himself would forget, thinking that he had already said everything.
“What is it?” Petrovich said and at the same time inspected with his single eye Akaky Akakievich’s whole uniform, beginning with the collar and ending with the sleeves, back, coattails, and buttonholes—which were all very familiar to him, because they were his own workmanship. Such is the habit of tailors: That is the first thing they will do when they meet you.
“Well, here’s like, Petrovich… the overcoat, the cloth… here you see, everywhere in other places it’s quite strong, it’s just gotten a little dusty, and it seems as if it’s old, but it’s new, but see, just in that one place it’s a little, you know… on the back, and also here on one shoulder it’s worn through just a little bit, and here on the other shoulder just a little—you see, that’s all. And it’s not much work…”
Petrovich took the housecoat, and after first laying it out on the table, he looked it over for a long time, shook his head, and reached to the windowsill for a round snuffbox with the portrait of some general on it, but we do not know which general, because the place where the face was had been poked through by a finger and then had a rectangular scrap of paper pasted on it.7 After taking some snuff, Petrovich spread the housecoat out on his arms and looked at it against the light, and again shook his head. Then he turned it with its lining up and again shook his head, again opened the lid with the general pasted over with paper, and after taking some snuff into his nose, he closed it, put the snuffbox away, and finally said: “No, it’s impossible to fix it: That’s some worn-out wardrobe!”
At these words Akaky Akakievich’s heart skipped a beat.
“Why is it impossible, Petrovich?” he said, almost in the pleading voice of a child. “After all, it’s just a little worn spot on the shoulder, after all, you have some little scraps…”
“Yes, we can find some scraps, the scraps can be found,” Petrovich said, “but it’s impossible to sew them on. The whole thing is rotten; if you touch it with the needle, it will come unraveled.”
“So let it unravel, then you’ll put a patch on right away.”
“But there’s nothing to put the patch on, there’s nowhere for it to get a foothold, it’s just too worn-out. You can hardly call it cloth—if the wind blows on it, it will fall to pieces.”
“Well, then just fasten it. How can it be, truly, like…!”
“No,” Petrovich said decisively, “it’s impossible to do anything. It’s a very bad business. You’d do better, when the cold wintertime comes, to make footwraps out of it, because stockings don’t keep you warm. The Germans thought that up so that they could grab more money for themselves” (Petrovich enjoyed getting in a jab at the Germans when he had the chance) “but as for the overcoat, it’s clear you’re going to have to get a new one made.”
At the word “new,” a fog came over Akaky Akakievich’s eyes, and everything in the room seemed to get all mixed up. The only thing he could see clearly was the general with his face pasted over with paper, who was located on the lid of Petrovich’s snuffbox.
“What do you mean, ‘new’?” he said, still feeling as if it were happening in a dream, “I don’t have any money for that.”
“Yes, a new one,” Petrovich said with barbaric serenity.
“Well, but if I had to get a new one, then how would it, like…”
“Do you mean what would it cost?”
“Yes.”
“You’d have to put in a little more than three fifties,” Petrovich said, and pursed his lips significantly. He really loved forceful effects. He loved to suddenly bewilder somebody and then take a sidelong glance at the face the bewildered person would make after hearing such words.
“One hundred and fifty rubles for an overcoat!” poor Akaky Akakievich shouted, shouted perhaps for the first time in his life, because he was always distinguished by the quietness of his voice.
“Yes, sir,” Petrovich said, “but it depends what kind of overcoat. If you put marten fur on the collar and a silk lining on the cape, then it would run to two hundred.”
“Petrovich, please,” Akaky Akakievich said in a pleading voice, not hearing and trying not to hear the words Petrovich had said and all his effects, “fix it somehow, so that it could be of service for just a little while more.”
“No, that would result in just wasting the work and spending money for nothing,” Petrovich said, and after such words Akaky Akakievich left entirely destroyed.
And Petrovich stood for a long time after he left, pursing his lips significantly and not taking up his work, pleased that he had not demeaned himself and had not betrayed the art of the tailor.
As he came out onto the street, Akaky Akakievich felt he was in a dream. “It’s such a business of such a kind,” he said to himself, “truly, I didn’t think it would turn out like…”—and then, after being silent a while, he added: “So that’s how it is! Finally, that’s how it turned out, and truly, I could not at all have supposed that it would be like that.” Then there followed again a long silence, after which he said: “So that’s it! That’s the kind of, really, totally unexpected, like… I couldn’t have at all… such a circumstance!” After he said this, instead of going home, he went in the exact opposite direction without suspecting it himself. Along the way a chimney sweep brushed against him with his whole dirty side and turned his shoulder black; a whole capful of lime poured onto him from the top of a house under construction. He didn’t notice any of this, and only later, when he bumped into a policeman on duty, who had set his halberd aside and was shaking some snuff out of a horn onto his callused fist, only then did he come to himself somewhat, and even then only because the policeman on duty said: “Why are you shoving up right in my snout, don’t you have enough sidewalk?” This caused him to look around and turn toward home.
Only here did he begin to collect his thoughts; he saw his situation in a clear and true form, and he began talking to himself no longer in fragments, but reasonably and frankly, as if talking with a sensible friend, the kind with whom one can talk about the most heartfelt and intimate matters. “Well, no,” Akaky Akakievich said, “you can’t discuss anything with Petrovich right now. He’s like… his wife must have given him a beating somehow. I’d better go see him on Sunday morning. After the Saturday night before, he’ll be squinting his eye and he’ll have overslept, and he’ll need a hair of the dog, and his wife won’t give him any money, and right then I’ll give him like a ten-kopeck coin right into his hand, and he’ll be more accommodating and then the overcoat like…”
That is how Akaky Akakievich reasoned to himself. He cheered himself up and waited for the first Sunday, and when he saw from a distance that Petrovich’s wife had left the house to go somewhere, he went right to his place. Petrovich indeed was squinting a lot after his Saturday, he was bending his head to the floor and had really overslept; but despite all that, as soon as he heard what Akaky Akakievich had come about, it was exactly as if the devil had shoved him. “It’s impossible,” he said, “be so good as to order a new one.” Akaky Akakievich immediately slipped him a ten-kopeck coin. “Thank you kindly, sir, I’ll have a drop to drink to your health,” Petrovich said, “but be so good as not to worry about the overcoat: It isn’t fit for any fitness. I’ll make you a glorious new overcoat, on that I insist.”
Akaky Akakievich again started to talk about mending it, but Petrovich didn’t let him finish and said: “I’m going to make you a new one no matter what, be so good as to count on it, I’ll do my very best. It can even be in the latest fashion: The collar will fasten with silver appliqué clasps.”8
At this point Akaky Akakievich saw that it was going to be impossible to do without a new overcoat, and his spirits utterly flagged. How, in fact, with what, where would the money come from to make it? Of course, he could partly rely on a future bonus for the holidays, but that money had long ago been allocated and apportioned in advance. He needed to get new trousers, to pay an old debt to the shoemaker for attaching new tops to his bootlegs, and he needed to order from the seamstress three shirts and about two sets of that article of linen which is unseemly to name in print—in short, all the money had to be divided up completely; and even if the director was so merciful that instead of a forty-ruble bonus he assigned forty-five or fifty, all the same only the most pitiful sum would remain, which would be like a drop in the sea of overcoat capital. Although, of course, he knew that sometimes a whimsy would lead Petrovich to ask God knows what exorbitant price, so that even his wife wouldn’t be able to restrain herself and would shout: “You’ve gone out of your mind, you idiot! Sometimes he’ll work for nothing, but now the evil spirit has gotten into him to ask such a price that he himself isn’t worth.” Although, of course, he knew that Petrovich would undertake to make the coat for eighty rubles; all the same, where was he going to get those eighty rubles? He could find half of it: half of it could be found; maybe even a little more; but where would he get the other half?
But first of all, the reader must know where the first half was to come from. Akaky Akakievich had the habit of taking a half-kopeck coin out of every ruble he spent and putting it aside in a small little box that locked with a key, with a little hole cut in the lid for the throwing-in of money. At the end of every six months he would audit the copper sum that had been amassed and would exchange it for silver change. He had been doing this for a long, long time, and so over the course of several years the amassed sum had turned out to be more than forty rubles. So, he had half of it on hand, but where was he to get the other half? Where could he get the other forty rubles?
Akaky Akakievich thought and thought, and decided that he would have to reduce his usual expenses for at least one year: to banish the drinking of tea in the evenings, not to light candles in the evenings, and if he needed to do something, to go to the landlady’s room and work by the light of her little candle; as he walked along the street, to step as lightly and carefully as he could along the cobblestones and flagstones, almost on tiptoe, so as not to wear out his soles too fast; to give his linen to the laundress as rarely as possible, and so as not to wear it out, to take it off as soon as he came home and remain in just a thick cotton robe that was very old and had been spared by time itself. One must speak the truth and say that at first it was rather difficult for him to get used to such limitations, but then it seemed to become a habit and things got better. He even got accustomed to going hungry in the evenings; but to make up for it he was nourished spiritually, bearing in his thoughts the eternal idea of the future overcoat. From that time it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he had gotten married, as if some other person was present with him, as if he was not alone, but a pleasant female life companion had agreed to follow life’s path along with him—and that companion was none other than the thickly padded overcoat with a strong lining showing no trace of wear.9
He became livelier, he even became firmer in character, like a person who has determined and set himself a goal. Doubt and indecisiveness—in short, all wavering and indefinite features—disappeared from his face and actions all by themselves. At times a fire shone in his eyes, and the most audacious and adventurous thoughts even flashed in his head: Should he not, in fact, put marten fur on the collar? Such meditations almost caused him to become absentminded. Once as he was copying a document, he nearly made a mistake, so that he shouted “Ooh!” almost out loud and crossed himself. Every month he went to see Petrovich at least once to talk about the overcoat, about where the best place would be to buy the cloth, and what color it should be, and what it would cost, and he would always return home, although a little concerned, still happy, thinking that finally the time would come when all of this would be bought and the overcoat would be made. The whole thing went faster than he had expected. Contrary to all expectations, the director assigned Akaky Akakievich a bonus of not forty or forty-five rubles, but a whole sixty rubles. Whether he had had a premonition that Akaky Akakievich needed an overcoat, or it just happened all by itself, because of this he ended up with an extra twenty rubles. This circumstance hastened the course of the matter. Another two or three months of slight hunger—and Akaky Akakievich had indeed accumulated about eighty rubles. His heart, which in general was extremely calm, began to beat.10
On the very first day he set off to the shops with Petrovich. They bought some very good cloth—and no wonder, because they had already been thinking about it for six months in advance, and hardly a month had gone by that they hadn’t stopped into the shops to see what the prices were. Petrovich himself said that better cloth did not exist. For the lining they chose calico, but of such good quality and so densely woven that according to Petrovich it was better than silk and even more beautiful and lustrous to look at. They did not buy marten, because it was indeed expensive; but instead of it they chose cat fur, the best cat they could find in the shop, a cat fur that from a distance one might always mistake for marten.11 Petrovich spent a whole two weeks on the overcoat, because there was a lot of stitching, otherwise it would have been ready earlier. Petrovich took twelve rubles for his labor—it simply couldn’t be any less. The whole thing was absolutely sewn with silk, with a double closely-stitched seam, and Petrovich then went over every seam with his own teeth, using them to press in various patterns.
It was… it’s difficult to say what day it was, but it was probably the most extremely solemn day in the life of Akaky Akakievich when Petrovich finally brought the overcoat. He brought it in the morning, right before the time when Akaky Akakievich had to go to the Department. The overcoat could not have come at a more opportune time, because the somewhat harsh cold weather had already begun, and it seemed to be threatening to get even worse. Petrovich appeared with the overcoat in a manner befitting a good tailor. His face had the most significant expression that Akaky Akakievich had ever seen. It seemed that he felt in full measure that he had done a great deed and that he had suddenly shown in himself the abyss that divides tailors who only replace linings and fix things from those who make things from scratch. He took the overcoat out of the enormous handkerchief in which he had brought it; the handkerchief was fresh from the laundress, so he then rolled it up and put it in his pocket for later use. After he took out the overcoat, he gave a very proud look and, holding it in both hands, threw it very deftly onto Akaky Akakievich’s shoulders; then he pulled it and smoothed it down from behind with his hand; then he draped it over Akaky Akakievich in a rather unbuttoned way. Akaky Akakievich, as a man well along in years, wanted to try it with his arms in the sleeves. Petrovich helped him put it on with his arms in the sleeves as well—it turned out that with his arms in the sleeves it was also very fine. In short, it turned out that the overcoat was utterly and perfectly just right. Petrovich did not miss this opportunity to say that it was only because he lived on a side street without a signboard, and because he had known Akaky Akakievich for a long time, that he had done the job so cheaply; on Nevsky Avenue they would have asked seventy-five rubles for the labor alone. Akaky Akakievich did not want to discuss this with Petrovich; he was afraid of all the major sums with which Petrovich liked to throw dust in people’s eyes. He paid him, thanked him, and immediately went out to the Department wearing his new overcoat. Petrovich came out after him and stayed on the street, watching the overcoat from a distance for a long time, and then he purposely went off to the side in order to loop around via a crooked lane, to run ahead, and come out onto the street again and look at his overcoat once more from the other side, that is, right into its face.
Meanwhile Akaky Akakievich was walking along in the most festive disposition of all his feelings. Every instant of every minute he was feeling that there was a new overcoat on his shoulders, and several times he almost grinned with inner satisfaction. In fact, there were two advantages: One was that it was warm, and the other was that it was good. He didn’t notice the journey at all, and he suddenly found himself in the Department. In the anteroom he took off the overcoat, looked it all over, and entrusted it to the particular oversight of the guard. It is unknown how everyone in the Department suddenly found out that Akaky Akakievich had a new overcoat and that the housecoat no longer existed. At that very moment everyone came running out into the anteroom to look at Akaky Akakievich’s new overcoat. They started congratulating and hailing him, so that at first he just smiled, but then he started feeling ashamed. And when they all gathered around and started saying that they needed to drink to the new overcoat, and that he at least had to throw them all an evening party, Akaky Akakievich got completely flustered and didn’t know what to do, how to answer them, and how to make some excuse. After a few minutes, blushing all over, he started trying naively to convince them that it was not a new overcoat at all, that it was just, it was the old overcoat.
Finally, one of the civil servants, who was even an assistant desk head, probably in order to show that he was not at all proud and would associate even with his inferiors, said: “Very well, I’ll throw the evening party instead of Akaky Akakievich, and I ask you all to come to my place for tea today: As if on purpose, it’s my name day today.” Naturally, the civil servants immediately congratulated the assistant desk head and eagerly accepted the invitation. Akaky Akakievich was starting to make an excuse, but they all said that that was impolite, that it was simply a shame and a disgrace, and he simply could not refuse. Later, however, it was pleasant for him to recall that because of this he would have the opportunity to walk around in his new overcoat even in the evening.
That whole day was like the greatest solemn feast day for Akaky Akakievich. He returned home in the happiest spirits, he took off the overcoat and hung it carefully on the wall, once again admiring the cloth and the lining, and then for the sake of comparison, he purposely pulled out his former housecoat, which had completely unraveled. He looked at it, and he began laughing: what a huge difference! And then for a long time as he ate dinner, he kept grinning when he recalled the condition the housecoat was in. He had a cheerful dinner, and after dinner he didn’t write anything, no documents, but just lay sybaritically on the bed until it got dark. Then without dragging things out, he got dressed, put the overcoat over his shoulders, and went out onto the street.
Unfortunately, we cannot say where the civil servant lived who had made the invitation. Our memory is starting to really play tricks on us, and everything in St. Petersburg, all the streets and houses, have gotten so merged and mixed up in our head that it is extremely difficult to retrieve anything from it in any decent form. Whatever the case may be, the one thing that is certain is that the civil servant lived in the better part of the city—which means, he lived very far from Akaky Akakievich. At first, Akaky Akakievich had to pass through some deserted streets with meager illumination, but the closer he got to the civil servant’s apartment the livelier, more populated, and more brightly illuminated the streets became. Pedestrians started to flash by more often, even some beautifully dressed ladies started to appear, some of the men he met had beaver-fur collars; he less frequently encountered poor cabbies with their wooden latticed sleighs studded with gilded nails—on the contrary, he kept meeting drivers of smart cabs wearing crimson velvet caps, with lacquered sleighs and bear-fur blankets, and coaches with beautifully trimmed coachboxes flew across the street, their wheels squealing on the snow.
Akaky Akakievich looked at all this as at something new. It had been several years since he had gone out onto the street in the evening. He stopped in front of an illuminated store window to look curiously at a picture that depicted a beautiful woman who had taken off her shoe, thus baring her entire, rather nice-looking foot; and behind her back, a man with whiskers and a beautiful imperial beard under his lip was sticking his head out of the door of another room. Akaky Akakievich shook his head and grinned and then went on his way. Why he grinned—whether it was because he had encountered a thing that he was quite unfamiliar with but for which, nevertheless, everyone retains a certain instinct, or whether he thought like many other civil servants, the following: “Well, I never, those Frenchmen! It can’t be denied, if they want something like, well indeed it’s just like…” But perhaps he didn’t even think that—after all, you can’t crawl into a person’s soul and find out everything he’s thinking.
Finally, he reached the building in which the assistant desk head had his apartment. The assistant desk head lived in the grand manner: A lamp was shining on the stairway, and the apartment was on the second floor. As he came into the anteroom, Akaky Akakievich saw whole rows of overshoes on the floor. Among them, in the middle of the room, stood a samovar, making noise and emitting puffs of steam. On the walls hung all sorts of overcoats and cloaks, some of which even had beaver collars or velvet lapels. On the other side of the wall one could hear noise and talk, which suddenly became clear and ringing when the door opened, and a footman came out carrying a tray covered with emptied glasses, a creamer, and a basket of biscuits. It was obvious that the civil servants had assembled a long time ago and had already drunk their first glass of tea.
Akaky Akakievich hung up his overcoat himself, went into the room, and all at once there flashed in his eyes candles, civil servants, pipes, and card tables, and his ear was struck by the indistinct sound of fluent conversation rising from all directions and the noise of chairs being moved. He stopped very awkwardly in the middle of the room, looking around and trying to figure out what he should do. But they had already noticed him and received him with a shout, and they all went to the anteroom right away to look at his overcoat again. Although he was partly embarrassed, Akaky Akakievich, being an open-hearted man, could not help but be glad when he saw how everyone praised his overcoat. Then, of course, they all abandoned both him and the overcoat and addressed themselves to the tables prepared for whist, as is usual. All of this—the noise, the talk, and the crowd of people—all this was somehow wondrous strange for Akaky Akakievich. He simply did not know what he should do, where to put his hands, feet, and his whole figure. Finally, he took a seat near the card players, looked at the cards, peeped into this one’s and that one’s faces, and after a while began to yawn, feeling bored, all the more since it had long since been the customary time for him to go to bed. He wanted to say goodbye to the host, but they didn’t let him go, saying that they absolutely had to each drink a glass of champagne in honor of the new garment. An hour later they served supper, consisting of vinaigrette salad, cold veal, pâté, pastries, and champagne. Akaky Akakievich was forced to drink two glasses, after which he felt that the room had become more cheerful, although he could not forget that it was already twelve o’clock and long past time for him to go home. To avoid letting the host think up some way of keeping him there, he quietly left the room and found his overcoat in the anteroom. Not without regret did he see it lying on the floor. He shook it out, removed every bit of fluff from it, put it on his shoulders, and went down the stairs to the street.
On the street it was still light. A few grocery stores, those permanent clubs for house servants and all other kinds of servants, were open, while others that were closed nevertheless emitted a long stream of light all along the crack of the door, signifying that they were not yet devoid of society, and that probably the servant women or men were still finishing up their discussions and conversations, plunging their masters into complete bewilderment about where they might be located. Akaky Akakievich walked along in cheerful spirits; he even started suddenly to run, for some unknown reason, after a lady who had passed by at the speed of lightning, every part of her body suffused with extraordinary motion. He immediately stopped, however, and started walking the way he had before, very quietly, himself amazed at his trotting gait that had come from no one knows where.
Soon there stretched before him those deserted streets that are not too cheerful even in daytime, not to mention in the evening. Now they became even more remote and secluded. The streetlamps appeared less often—apparently, less lamp oil was being allocated; wooden houses and fences appeared; there was not a soul anywhere; the only thing that sparkled was the snow on the streets, and the low, sleeping little hovels with closed shutters appeared dismally black. He approached the place where the street was intersected by an endless square with buildings barely visible on its other side, which looked like a terrifying desert.
In the distance, God knows where, a little light flickered in a policeman’s booth that seemed to be standing on the edge of the world. Here Akaky Akakievich’s cheerfulness decreased significantly. He entered the square not without an involuntary apprehension, exactly as if his heart had a premonition of something evil. He looked back and to either side: It was as if a sea surrounded him. “No, it’s better not to look,” he thought, and walked along with his eyes closed, and when he opened them to see whether the end of the square was near, he suddenly saw that some people with mustaches were standing almost right in front of his nose, but what kind of people they were, he could not even make out. A fog came over his eyes and a beating started in his chest. “Hey, that overcoat is mine!” one of them said in a voice of thunder, grabbing him by the collar. Akaky Akakievich was about to try to shout “Help!” when the other one stuck a fist the size of a civil servant’s head up to his very mouth and said: “Now just try and shout!” Akaky Akakievich felt only that they took the overcoat off of him and gave him a kick with their knee, and he fell onto his back in the snow, and he didn’t feel anything more.
A few minutes later he came to himself and got up onto his feet, but no one was there. He felt that it was cold out in the field and he had no overcoat. He started to shout, but his voice, it seemed, had no intention of making it all the way to the far ends of the square. In desperation, shouting constantly, he started running across the square right to the booth, next to which stood the policeman on duty, leaning on his halberd and watching, seemingly curious to know why the hell someone was running toward him from a distance and shouting. Akaky Akakievich ran up to him and began to shout in a panting voice that he was asleep and not looking at anything and didn’t see them robbing a person. The policeman answered that he hadn’t seen anything; he did see two people stop him in the middle of the square, but he thought they were his friends; and he said that instead of indulging in vain abuse, he should go tomorrow to see the district police inspector, and the district police inspector would find out who had taken the overcoat.
Akaky Akakievich came running home in utter disorder. His hair, of which he still had a small quantity on his temples and the back of his head, was completely messed up. His side and chest and trousers were all covered with snow. The old woman, the landlady of his apartment, hearing a terrible knocking at the door, hurriedly jumped out of bed and with only one shoe on went running to open the door, holding her nightgown closed over her breast, out of modesty; but when she opened it, she stepped back, seeing Akaky Akakievich in such a state. When he told her what had happened, she threw up her hands and said that he needed to go right to the sector inspector, that the district inspector would put one over on him, he would make promises and then would drag it out; but best of all would be to go right to the sector inspector, that she was even acquainted with him, because Anna, the Finnish woman who used to work for her as a cook, had now gotten a job as a nanny for the sector inspector, that she often saw him himself as he was riding by their building, and that he also came to church every Sunday, he’d pray and at the same time look at everyone cheerfully, and that it follows that he obviously must be a kind person.
After hearing this solution, Akaky Akakievich sadly plodded off to his room, and how he spent the night there I will leave to the judgment of anyone who can in the least bit imagine the situation of another person. Early in the morning, he set off to see the sector inspector, but they said he was sleeping; he came at ten o’clock—they said again, he’s sleeping; he came at eleven o’clock—they said, the sector inspector is not home; he came at dinnertime—but the clerks in the vestibule did not want to let him through and demanded to know what his business was and what had necessitated his visit and what had happened. So finally, for once in his life, Akaky Akakievich felt like showing some character, and he said point-blank that he needed to see the sector inspector himself personally, that they wouldn’t dare not to let him in, that he had come from the Department on official business, and that he would make such a complaint about them that then they would see. The clerks did not dare to say anything against this, and one of them went to summon the sector inspector. The sector inspector received the story of the theft of the overcoat in an extremely strange manner. Instead of paying attention to the main point of the matter, he started interrogating Akaky Akakievich: Why was he returning home so late, had he perhaps dropped into and spent time in some disorderly house; so that Akaky Akakievich got completely embarrassed and left without knowing whether the proper process for the case of the overcoat would be put in motion or not.
That whole day he was absent from the office (the only time in his life this had happened). The next day he presented himself, all pale and wearing his old housecoat, which had become even more deplorable. His narrative about the theft of the overcoat, despite the fact that there were some civil servants who didn’t miss even this opportunity to make fun of Akaky Akakievich, nevertheless moved the hearts of many of them. They immediately decided to take up a collection for him, but they collected only the most trivial sum, because the civil servants had already spent a lot subscribing to buy a portrait of the director and some book suggested by the section head, the author of which was a friend of his—and so it turned out to be a trivial sum. One of them, moved by compassion, decided to help Akaky Akakievich at least with good advice, and said that he should go not to the district police inspector, because although it might happen that the district police inspector, wishing to earn the approval of his supervisors, would find the overcoat by some means, nevertheless the overcoat would remain with the police, if he could not present legitimate proof that it belonged to him; so it would be best of all if he would apply to a certain significant personage, that the significant personage, after exchanging letters and communicating with the appropriate people, could make the case go more successfully. There was no escaping it; Akaky Akakievich decided to go to see the significant personage.12
What exactly the post of the significant personage was and in what it consisted is still unknown to this day. The reader must know that a certain significant personage had only recently been made a significant personage, and before that he had been an insignificant personage. By the way, even now his position is not considered significant in comparison to other, even more significant positions. But there will always be a circle of people for whom something that other people consider insignificant is significant. Nevertheless, he tried to enhance its significance by many other means, namely: He made a rule that the lower-ranking civil servants had to meet him on the stairway when he came to the office; that no one could dare to present themselves to him directly, but that everything had to go in the strictest order: a collegiate registrar would report to a provincial secretary, the provincial secretary would report to a titular councillor or whoever else, and in this way the business would finally reach him. That’s how it is in holy Russia, everything is infected by imitation, everyone imitates and poses as his supervisor. They even say that a certain titular councillor, when they made him the administrator of some separate little chancellery, immediately partitioned off a special room for himself, calling it the “official room,” and stationed some footmen with red collars and gold braid at the door, who would take hold of the doorknobs and open them to all visitors, although there was hardly enough space in the “official room” to place an ordinary writing desk.
The manners and habits of the significant personage were sedate and majestic but not complicated. The main basis of his system was strictness. “Strictness, strictness, and—strictness,” he would usually say, and at the final word he would usually look very significantly into the face of the person he was talking to. Although there was really no reason for this, because the dozen civil servants who made up the entire governing mechanism of the chancellery were already as terrified as was appropriate. When they saw him coming from a distance, they would stop their work and wait, standing at attention, until the supervisor had passed through the room. His usual conversation with his inferiors had a flavor of strictness and consisted almost entirely of three phrases: “How dare you? Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you understand who is standing in front of you?” In his soul, however, he was a kind man, good and obliging with his colleagues, but the rank of general had completely thrown him off course. After he obtained the rank of general, he seemed to get confused, to lose his way, and he didn’t know at all what he should do. If he happened to be with his equals, he was a proper person, a very decent person, in many respects even an intelligent person; but as soon as he happened to be in company where there were people even one rank lower than him, he was simply wretched. He would be silent, and his situation would arouse pity, all the more since he himself felt that he could be spending his time in an incomparably better way. One could sometimes see in his eyes a powerful desire to join in some interesting conversation and circle, but he would be stopped by the thought: Would that not be too much on his part, would that not be too familiar, and would he not thereby lower his significance? And as a result of such meditations he would remain eternally in the very same silent state, only uttering a few monosyllabic sounds from time to time, and in this way he acquired the title of the most boring person.
This is the significant personage to whom our Akaky Akakievich presented himself, and he presented himself at the most inauspicious time, extremely inopportunely for himself, although most opportunely for the significant personage. The significant personage was in his private office and had gotten into a very, very cheerful conversation with a certain old acquaintance and childhood friend who had arrived recently, whom he hadn’t seen for several years. At that moment they announced to him that someone named Bashmachkin had come to see him. He asked brusquely: “Who is that?” They answered: “Some civil servant.”—“Ah! He can wait, I don’t have time now,” the significant person said. Here we must say that the significant person had told a blatant lie. He had time; he and the acquaintance had already long managed to talk about everything and had long been interspersing their conversation with prolonged silences, patting each other lightly on the thigh and saying: “So, Ivan Abramovich!”—“That’s how it is, Stepan Varlamovich!” But for all that, nevertheless, he ordered the civil servant to wait, in order to show his acquaintance, a person who had left the service long ago and had been buried at home in the country, how long civil servants had to sit waiting in his anteroom.
Finally, having talked their fill and having been silent even more than their fill, and having smoked a cigarillo in extremely comfortable armchairs with reclining backs, he finally seemed to suddenly remember and said to the secretary who had stopped by the door with some documents to be submitted: “Yes, it seems there’s some civil servant standing out there; tell him that he can come in.” Seeing Akaky Akakievich’s humble appearance and his old uniform, he turned to him suddenly and said: “What can I do for you?”—in a brusque and firm voice, which he had practiced on purpose in advance in his room, all alone in front of the mirror, a week before he obtained his present position and the rank of general. Akaky Akakievich, who had started feeling the proper timidity well in advance, was somewhat embarrassed and, as much as the freedom of his tongue would allow him, explained as best he could, adding the particle “like” even more frequently than usual, that it was a quite new overcoat, and now it had been stolen in the most inhumane fashion, and that he was applying to him so that by means of some kind of petition somehow like, he would exchange letters with Mr. Chief of Police or somebody like that and find his overcoat. For some unknown reason, this behavior seemed to the general to be too familiar.
“What’s wrong with you, my dear sir,” he continued brusquely, “don’t you know the correct procedure? Where do you think you’ve come? Don’t you know how things are done? You should have first submitted an appeal about this to the Chancellery; it would have gone to the desk head, to the section head, and then it would have been transmitted to the secretary, and the secretary would have delivered it to me….”
“But, Your Excellency,” Akaky Akakievich said, trying to gather the entire little fistful of nerve that was in him, and feeling at the same time that he was sweating horribly, “I ventured to trouble Your Excellency because secretaries are like… an unreliable folk…”
“What, what, what?” the significant personage said. “Where did you get the nerve? Where did you get ideas like this? What sort of riotous conduct has spread among young people against their supervisors and superiors!”
It seems that the significant personage had not noticed that Akaky Akakievich was already past the age of fifty. It follows that if he could be called a young person, it was only in a relative sense, in other words, in relation to someone who was past seventy.
“Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you understand who is standing in front of you? Do you understand that, do you understand it? I’m asking you.”
At this point he stamped his foot, raising his voice to such a high note that even a non–Akaky Akakievich would have been terrified. Akaky Akakievich was utterly stunned; he staggered, he started shaking all over and could not stay standing. If the guards had not come running up to support him, he would have tumbled to the floor with a plop; they carried him out almost motionless. And the significant personage, satisfied that the effect had exceeded even his expectations, and quite intoxicated by the idea that his word could even deprive a person of their senses, gave a sidelong look at his friend to see how he was taking it, and not without satisfaction did he see that his friend was in a most indefinite condition and was even beginning to feel some terror on his own behalf.
Akaky Akakievich had no memory of how he came downstairs, how he came out onto the street, none of it. He could not feel either his arms or his legs. He had never in his whole life been so scorched by a general, and one from a different office at that. He walked through a snowstorm that was whistling along the streets, his mouth wide open, stumbling off the sidewalks. The wind, as is the St. Petersburg custom, was blowing on him from all four directions, out of all the lanes. In a twinkling it blew a quinsy into his throat, and he made it home without the strength to say a single word; he swelled all up and took to his bed. Such is the power sometimes of an appropriate scorching! The very next day he was found to have a serious fever. Thanks to the magnanimous assistance of the St. Petersburg climate, the illness progressed more quickly than might have been expected, and when the doctor made his appearance, after taking his pulse, he could find nothing better to do than to prescribe a poultice, solely in order that the patient would not be left without the beneficent aid of medicine; but nevertheless, he immediately pronounced that in a day and a half he would certainly be kaput. Then he turned to the landlady and said: “And you, madam, don’t waste any time, order him a pine coffin immediately, because an oaken one would be too expensive for him.”
Whether Akaky Akakievich heard these fatal words pronounced, and if he heard them, whether they had a devastating effect on him, whether he regretted his wretched life—none of this is known, because he was in delirium and fever the whole time. He was constantly having visions of phenomena, one stranger than the next: At one moment he saw Petrovich and was ordering him to make an overcoat with traps in it for the thieves he kept imagining under the bed, and he was continually calling the landlady to drag one thief out from under his very blanket; the next moment he would ask why his old housecoat was hanging in front of him when he had a new overcoat; then he imagined that he was standing in front of the general, listening to the appropriate scorching, and was saying: “I’m sorry, Your Excellency!”—then, finally, he even used foul language, uttering the most terrible words, so that his old landlady even crossed herself, having never heard anything like it from him before, especially since these words followed immediately after the words “Your Excellency.” Then he started talking complete nonsense, so that it was impossible to understand anything; all you could see was that his disorderly words and thoughts kept tossing and turning around the single subject of the overcoat.
Finally, poor Akaky Akakievich gave up the ghost. They did not place either his room or his belongings under seal, because in the first place, there were no heirs, and in the second place, only a very small inheritance remained, namely: a bundle of goose-quill pens, a quire of white official paper, three pairs of socks, two or three buttons that had come off his trousers, and the housecoat that is already familiar to the reader. Who inherited all this, God knows. I have to admit, not even the narrator of this story was interested enough to find out. They took Akaky Akakievich away and buried him. And St. Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakievich, as if he had never even been there. Thus disappeared and vanished a creature who was not defended by anyone, not dear to anyone, not interesting to anyone, who did not even attract the attention of the natural scientist who never misses the chance to stick an ordinary fly on a pin and inspect it through a microscope; a creature who submissively endured office mockery and descended to the grave without having performed any extreme feats, but who all the same, if only just before the end of his life, had seen the flash of a bright guest in the form of an overcoat, which had animated his poor life for an instant; a creature on whom misfortune had then crashed down intolerably, as it has crashed down onto the kings and overlords of the world… A few days after his death a guard was sent to his lodgings from the Department to give him the order to present himself immediately, by the demand of the supervisor; but the guard had to return empty-handed, with the answer that he could not come any more, and to the inquiry “Why?,” he expressed himself in the following words: “Well, it’s like this—he died, they buried him four days ago.” That is how the people in the Department learned of the death of Akaky Akakievich, and the next day a new civil servant was already sitting in his place, who was much taller and who made his letters not in such an upright handwriting, but much more inclined and slanting.
But who could have imagined that this is not all there is to say about Akaky Akakievich and that he was fated to live noisily for several days after his death, as if in reward for a life that no one had noticed? But that is how it happened, and our poor story has unexpectedly taken on a fantastic ending. Rumors suddenly started spreading through St. Petersburg that near the Kalinkin Bridge and much farther a corpse had started to appear in the form of a civil servant who was seeking an overcoat that had been filched, and that under the pretext of the stolen overcoat it was stripping all kinds of overcoats from everyone’s shoulders, without distinguishing rank and title: overcoats with cat fur, with beaver fur, with cotton padding, raccoon coats, fox coats, bear coats—in short, all the sorts of fur and leather that humans have devised for covering their own hides. One of the civil servants from the Department saw the corpse with his own eyes and immediately recognized him as Akaky Akakievich, but this inspired such terror in him that he ran off as fast as he could and so did not manage to get a good look but saw only how the corpse shook his finger at him threateningly from a distance. Complaints started coming in ceaselessly from all directions that the backs and shoulders, not just of titular, but even of the most privy councillors, had been subjected to thorough chilling as a result of the nocturnal stripping-off of overcoats. The police got a directive to catch the corpse at all costs, dead or alive, and to punish him in the cruelest fashion, as an example to others, and they very nearly succeeded in this. To wit, in Kiryushkin Lane the policeman of a certain district had almost grabbed the corpse quite by the collar at the very scene of the crime, in its attempt to strip a woolen overcoat off a retired musician who had tootled on a flute in his day. After grabbing the corpse by the collar, he summoned two of his colleagues with a shout, and entrusted them with holding on to the corpse, while he took just one moment to reach into his boot in order to get his flat birchbark snuffbox, so as to temporarily refresh his nose, which had been frostbitten six times in his life; but apparently the snuff was of the sort that not even a corpse could stand. The policeman had hardly had time, after closing his right nostril with his finger, to inhale half a fistful with his left nostril, when the corpse sneezed so powerfully that he splattered all three of them in the eyes. In the time it took them to raise their fists to wipe their eyes, the corpse vanished without a trace, so that they weren’t even sure whether or not he had really been in their hands. From that time, policemen conceived such a terror of corpses that they were even afraid to grab the living and would just shout from a distance: “Hey, you over there, move along!”—and the corpse–civil servant started appearing even beyond the Kalinkin Bridge, inducing serious terror in all timid people.
But we have quite abandoned a certain significant personage, who was really almost the cause of the fantastic turn that our nevertheless quite true story has taken. First of all, justice demands that we say that a certain significant personage, soon after the departure of poor, scorched-into-ashes Akaky Akakievich, felt something akin to regret. Compassion was not alien to him; his heart was accessible to many kind impulses, despite the fact that his rank very often kept them from being manifested. As soon as his visiting friend had left his private office, he even started meditating about poor Akaky Akakievich. And from that time, almost every day, he had a vision of the pale Akaky Akakievich, who had not been able to endure an official scorching. The thought of him disturbed him so that a week later he decided even to send a civil servant to him to find out how he was and whether in fact there was not some way to help him; and when they reported to him that Akaky Akakievich had died suddenly of a fever, he was even staggered, he heard the reproaches of his conscience, and the whole day he was in low spirits. Wishing to be somewhat diverted and to forget the unpleasant impression, he set off for an evening party at the home of one of his friends, where he found some decent society, and best of all—everyone there was of almost one and the same rank, so that he had absolutely no reason to feel constrained. This had an amazing effect on his emotional disposition. He became expansive, his conversation became pleasant and amiable—in short, he spent the evening in a very pleasant fashion. Over supper he drank about two glasses of champagne, a remedy that is well known to have a pretty positive effect on the matter of cheerfulness. The champagne imparted to him a disposition toward various emergency measures, namely: He decided not to go home yet, but to drop in to see a certain lady of his acquaintance, Karolina Ivanovna, a lady of German extraction, it seems, for whom he felt quite friendly relations. We must say that the significant personage was a man no longer young, a good husband, a respectable father of a family. Two sons, of whom one was already serving in a chancellery, and a comely sixteen-year-old daughter with a somewhat arched but pretty little nose, would come every day to kiss his hand, saying, “Bonjour, Papa.” His wife, a woman who was still fresh and even not at all bad-looking, would first give him her hand to kiss and then, turning it over to the other side, would kiss his hand. But the significant personage, although he was quite satisfied with his domestic family endearments, found it seemly to have, for friendly relations, a female friend in another part of the city. This female friend was not a bit prettier or younger than his wife, but such enigmas happen in the world, and it is not our business to make judgments about them.
And so, the significant personage went downstairs, got into his sleigh, and said to the coachman: “To Karolina Ivanovna’s”—while he himself, having wrapped himself up most luxuriously in his warm overcoat, remained in that pleasant situation, the best that can be devised for a Russian person, that is, when you yourself are not thinking about anything, but meanwhile the thoughts come into your head all by themselves, one more pleasant than the last, without giving you the trouble of chasing after them and seeking them. Suffused with satisfaction, he lightly recalled all the cheerful passages of the evening he had just spent, all the words that had made the little circle laugh out loud; he even repeated many of them under his breath and found that they were still just as funny as before, and so it is no wonder that he himself laughed heartily. From time to time, however, he was bothered by the gusty wind, which appeared from God knows where and for goodness knows what reason, and slashed at his face, throwing up lumps of snow into it, blowing up the collar of his overcoat like a sail or suddenly throwing it onto his head with unnatural force, and thus causing him endless efforts to extricate himself from it.
Suddenly the significant personage felt that someone had seized him very firmly by the collar. When he turned around, he saw a person of short stature, in an old worn-out uniform, and not without horror did he recognize Akaky Akakievich. The civil servant’s face was as pale as the snow, and he looked just like a corpse. But the horror of the significant personage exceeded all bounds when he saw that the corpse’s mouth twisted and, breathing on him the terrible breath of the grave, he uttered the following speeches: “Ah! So there you are, finally! Finally, I’ve got you like, I’ve caught you by the collar! It’s your overcoat I need! You didn’t make any efforts about mine, plus you scorched me—so give me yours now!” The poor significant personage almost died. No matter how full of character he was in the chancellery and in front of his inferiors in general, and although everyone said after one look at his manly appearance and figure: “Ooh, what character!”—here, like many other people of heroic appearance, he felt such terror that not without reason he began even to fear some kind of morbid attack. He even threw the overcoat quickly off his shoulders and shouted to the coachman in a voice not his own: “Home, as fast as you can!” The coachman, hearing the voice that was usually uttered at decisive moments and was even accompanied by something much more physical, tucked his head between his shoulders to be on the safe side, brandished his whip, and tore off as fast as an arrow. A little more than six minutes later the significant personage was already in front of the entrance to his home. Pale, frightened, and without an overcoat, instead of going to see Karolina Ivanovna, he went home, somehow dragged himself to his room, and spent the night in very great disorder, so that the next morning over tea, his daughter said straight out: “You are quite pale today, Papa.” But Papa was silent and said not a word to anyone about what had happened to him, and where he had been, and where he had wanted to go.
This incident made a powerful impression on him. He even started saying to his subordinates: “How dare you, do you understand who is standing in front of you?” much less often; if he did say it, then not before first hearing out what the matter was. But even more remarkable is the fact that from that time the appearances of the civil servant–corpse completely ceased: Apparently the General’s overcoat fit his shoulders just perfectly; at least, no more cases were heard of in which someone’s overcoat was stripped off. Nevertheless, many active and solicitous people simply did not want to calm down, and they said that the civil servant-corpse was continuing to appear in distant parts of the city. Indeed, a certain policeman in Kolomna saw with his own eyes the ghost appearing out from behind a building; but being somewhat feeble by nature, so that once an ordinary full-grown piglet that had rushed out of a private house knocked him off his feet, to the enormous laughter of the cabbies who were standing around, from whom he demanded a half-kopeck each for snuff as a fine for such mockery—so, being feeble, he did not dare to stop the ghost, but just walked behind him in the darkness until finally the ghost suddenly looked around and stopped, asking, “What the hell do you want?”—and displayed a fist of a kind you won’t find among the living. The policeman said, “Nothing,” and turned back that very minute. The ghost, however, was now much taller, had an enormous mustache, and turning his steps, it seemed, toward the Obukhov Bridge, vanished completely in the nocturnal darkness.