What I’ve Learned

A googol – 1 with 100 zeros after it – is a number so large that there is not a googol of anything on Earth. Not grains of sand. Not drops of water in the oceans. Not even atoms.The search engine, Google, was meant to be named Googol (to represent the vast amount of information it could contain), but it was accidentally misspelled and the mistake stuck.And then there’s Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. (In English, his name is pronounced GOH-gall.)Nikolai Gogol was born in the Ukraine in 1809. His writing is often compared to that of Edgar Allen Poe, who was also born in 1809.Poe, as you may know, wrote Gothic horror stories. Dark and creepy stuff, like the Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Pit and the Pendulum.Gogol also wrote dark stuff. Instead of being referred to as Gothic horror, his stories are often called fantastic. Call them what you may, his stories are so akin to Poe’s that many essays have been written comparing the two.One of Gogol’s stories – probably his most famous – is called The Overcoat. It’s about a fellow named Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin (let’s just call him Akaky) who works as a government clerk and copyist. He is a hard worker, but his efforts are unrecognized. The younger clerks in the office tease him and try to distract him from his work. One of the things they tease him about is his old, threadbare overcoat.Akaky decides to have the overcoat repaired so it is more presentable. He takes it to a tailor, who says the coat is in such bad condition, it’s not repairable.Though Akaky can’t afford a new overcoat, he is determined to have one. He decides to save up, and to do so, lives in a painfully frugal manner. He is filled with excitement at the prospect of someday having a new overcoat and can think of little else. Often he meets with the tailor to discuss the style and materials of the longed-for coat.At last, thanks to his self-sacrifice and an unexpected holiday salary bonus, Akaky has enough for the overcoat. He and the tailor go to the shops in St. Petersburg and buy the finest materials that Akaky can afford. The new coat is everything the humble clerk had hoped for.It is of such quality, everyone in the office is impressed. His boss decides to host a party honoring the new overcoat. After the party, Akaky is walking home at night and is accosted by two thugs who beat him up and steal the overcoat. From that point, the story, which has been pleasant and almost comic, becomes dystopian and Poe-like. I won’t spoil the ending. There are English texts of the story available online, as well as videos of it being read aloud. There have even been movies made of it.Poe and Gogol both died young; Poe in 1849 and Gogol in 1852.How Gothic is that.