"The Structure of Gogol's The Overcoat,'" translated by Beth Paul and Muriel Nesbitt in Russian Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, October, 1963, pp. 377-99.

In this essay, which was first published in Russian in 1919, Eichenbaum examines the narrative devices of "The Overcoat" and discusses their relationship to the structure of the story. He argues that the comic and pathetic elements work together to create a grotesque style.

The structure of a short story depends in large part on the kind of role which the author's personal tone plays in it, i.e., on whether this tone is an organizing principle, creating more or less the illusion of a narrative in the first person, or whether it serves only as a formal tying together of events, and thus occupies an auxiliary position. The primitive short story and the novel of adventure have nothing to do with the first-person narrative, nor do...