The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, Harvard University Press, 1976, 333 p.

In this thematic study the critic argues that Gogol's story is a romantic tale with the overcoat representing the love interest.

The single most famous short story in the whole of Russian literature, "The Overcoat" is also the most widely misunderstood. Russian critics of the nineteenth century enveloped it in a thick fog of sentimentalization. It was credited with being the beginning of the philanthropic trend in Russian literature, the first depiction of the "insulted and injured" little man, the first realistic depiction of poverty and any number of other literary firsts, to which historically it did not have the slightest claim. The celebrated and oft-quoted maxim "We all emerged from under Gogol's overcoat," long incorrectly attributed to Dostoyevsky and ultimately traced to the turn-of-the-century French critic Melchior de Vogüé, implied that Russian realism in its totality grew...