While the Apocalypse – Blog

“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immortal ‘The Overcoat,’ he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.” Tough though that act is to follow, generations of filmmakers around the world have attempted to adapt for the screen that masterwork of a short story about the outerwear-related struggles of an impoverished bureaucrat.

One particular pair of Russian filmmakers has actually spent a generation or two making their own version of “The Overcoat”: the married couple Yuri Norstein and Francheska Yarbusova, who began the project back in 1981.

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