Nabokov mentions somewhere or other that if you read Gogol long enough, you will eventually see the world through his goggles.
How does Gogol offer a reader new goggles through which to see the world?
One way is by his connecting the unconnected, by transforming one thing into another, until the reader learns to see surprising connections everywhere in the actual world.
In Gogol’s short story, “The Overcoat,” the reader encounters a snuffbox which, after many transformations, becomes the climactic, midnight mugging in an abandoned city square.
Here is the snuff box on its first appearance:
Petrovich . . . reached to the windowsill for his snuffbox, adorned with the portrait of some general, though what general is unknown, for the place where the face should have been had been rubbed through by the finger and a square bit of paper had been pasted over it.
Box, general, face, finger, square, paper, and the nose that sniffs the snuff—transform in a myriad of inventive ways.
Here are the major transformations:
He did not notice it, and only when he ran against a watchman, who . . . was shaking some snuff from his box into his horny hand, did he recover himself a little, and that because the watchman said, “Why are you poking yourself into a man’s very face?”
Some insignificant assistant to the head clerk would thrust a paper under his nose . . .
Akaky Akakiyevich had a habit of putting, for every ruble he spent, a groschen into a small box, fastened with lock and key, and with a slit in the top for the reception of money.
He halted out of curiosity before a shopwindow, to look at a picture representing a handsome woman, who had thrown off her shoe, thereby baring her whole foot in a very pretty way; whilst behind her the head of a man with whiskers and a handsome moustache peeped through the doorway of another room.
Finally, he sat down by the players, looked at the cards, gazed at the face of one and another . . .
He entered the square, not without an involuntary sensation of fear, as though his heart warned him of some evil. . . . he suddenly beheld, standing just before his very nose, some bearded individuals of precisely what sort, he could not make out. . . . Akaky Akakiyevich was about to shout “Help!” when the second man thrust a fist, about the size of an official’s head, at his very mouth. . . .
. . . the officials had already spent a great deal in subscribing for the director’s new portrait . . .
They even say that a certain titular councilor, when promoted to the head of some small separate office, immediately partitioned off a private room for himself . . . and posted at the door a lackey with red collar and braid, who grasped the handle of the door, and opened to all comers, though the audience chamber would hardly hold an ordinary writing table.
. . .but only saw how he threatened him from afar with his menacing finger.
And thus, a reader begins to see that a finger-smeared face of a general on a snuffbox can, through a myriad of inventive associations, be transformed, perhaps, into anything whatsoever that the imagination desires.
But to see the world this way . . . requires a choice.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.