"On Gogol's The Overcoat,'" translated by Priscilla Meyer and Steven Rudy, in Dostoevsky & Gogol: Texts and Criticism, edited by Priscilla Meyer and Steven Rudy, Ardis, 1979, pp. 137-60.

The excerpt below was originally published in Russian in 1938 in the journal Sovremennye zapiski. Here, Chizhevsky looks at the frequent use of the word dazhe, "even," and argues that this textual detail helps establish the narrative style and tone of the story as well as providing a key to interpreting the main theme of "The Overcoat."

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Is it necessary to write more about "The Overcoat"? We all know Gogol's tale from our school days, and if we have later happened to read books and articles about Gogol—whether they were works following the "social approach" typical of Russian literary criticism and Russian literary history or the works of "formalists"—we always find one and the same thing in reading them...