8. “Silver appliqué” refers to plated silver.
9. The comparison of the overcoat to a “pleasant female life companion” is strengthened in the original text by the fact that the word used for overcoat, shinel’, is of feminine gender and has feminine pronouns and adjectives used with it.
10. The word for “calm,” pokoinyi, can also be translated as “deceased,” thus adding to the strange image of Akaky’s heart only now beginning to beat.
11. The editors of PSS 2009 point out that in his notebooks for September 1841, Gogol described markets in St. Petersburg at which cats were sold for fur, with gray cats being the most desirable, presumably because they could be “mistaken for marten.”
12. The expression translated here as “significant personage” is znachitel’noe litso in Russian. The word litso can mean “personage,” which is clearly the primary meaning here, but it also means “face.” The significance of the human face as a representation of the whole personality is an important theme in Gogol’s works (most notably “The Nose”), but there is no English word that can convey this secondary meaning in the context of “The Overcoat.”
Russian Library
Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen
Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson
City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France
Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview by Linor Goralik, edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokur
Sisters of the Cross by Alexei Remizov, translated by Roger John Keys and Brian Murphy
Redemption by Friedrich Gorenstein, translated by Andrew Bromfield
The Man Who Couldn’t Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Marian Schwartz
Necropolis by Vladislav Khodasevich, translated by Sarah Vitali
Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novellas by Yuz Aleshkovsky, translated by Duffield White, edited by Susanne Fusso
New Russian Drama: An Anthology, edited by Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt
A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova, translated and with an introduction by Barbara Heldt
Fandango and Other Stories by Alexander Grin, translated by Bryan Karetnyk
Woe from Wit: A Verse Comedy in Four Acts by Alexander Griboedov, translated by Betsy Hulick