The Greatcoat

Dear Students,

I complain about the too-conspicuous category of gender in Slavic. It's everywhere, and we have to force students to pay attention to it. Witness the little Czech boy who said "Ja to nechtela, ja to nechtela" 'I didn't want that!!' -- and his mother whopped him over the behind because he used the feminine agreement he heard so often from her. Take that and learn gender, blockhead! How cruel is Mother Language, mother tongue.

In German, students complain that there's no apparent ''rule" for finding the gender; to be sure, there are some easy clues to certain groups of words, like diminutives in -chen, which perversely are neuter from the suffix instead of masculine or feminine from the referent. French, too, offers challenges to the gender-challenged, including me. How many times did I look up the gender of terre, 'earth'! I had a block against remembering French gender.

Russian's rules are a lot simpler. Only in third declension nouns in soft sign does one have to hesitate between masculine and feminine -- and those ending in hushers are fem., as are all nouns that refer to women. Male hypocoristics in a/я are masculine, even though they are members of the feminine class. And then there are my favorite -- the epicene words, which take the gender of their real world referent. They are usually expressive, often pejorative: соня 'sleepyhead', пьяница 'drunkard', убийца 'murderer'. So: он горький пьяница, и она тоже горькая пьяница.

All of this is good enough. Students like to seek deeper meaning in nominal gender, deep symbolic meaning. 'Love' is fem. in Russian, Czech, and German; death is also feminine in Slavic but masculine in German. The figure of the grim reaper is feminine in Slavic, but not so in English. We have смертушка 'Godmother death' -- somehow a nightmarishly gruesome figure. Life is feminine in Russian and French, but neuter in German (via the -en of Leben). Earth is feminine in Russian and French. These things do not have symbolic meaning for Russian speakers -- or do they? There are two words for moon, one feminine, luna, and one, meaning 'month' is masculine. I can go on, but I can't make any conclusions.

Readers of Gogol have made much of the fact that the overcoat, or greatcoat, in his famous short story, is feminine. Even the garrulous narrator notes this and highlights it. When Akakij Akakievich (his name, by the way, is derived from the nursery term ka-ka, to go number two), has a new greatcoat made for him by the tailor Petrovich, going to ridiculous lengths to scrimp and save money to pay for it from his exiduous salary -- he steps very lightly on the floor so as not to wear out his shoes, and he refrains from taking documents home to copy, his favorite pastime, to save on candles -- it is a banner day in his life. It is "as though he had gotten married, as though a new life companion had joined him." This, to a miserable little man who had never experienced joys or sadnesses, is a new undreamt-of dimension of life, оpened up to him by the шинель, the new overcoat. He had never been so proud as he was the day Petrovich himself delivered the new overcoat, and Petrovich examined and adjusted it from the front, from the back, from the sides, -- and it was good, it was wonderful!

But no happiness lasts forever in Russian literature. No sooner blessed with love is A.A. than he loses it. A robber steals his overcoat, right on the square, in full view of a policeman who "thought [the robber and party] were his friends." A "significant personage" might be able to help Akakij, but he is a narcissistic bureaucrat who disdains to help and curses Akakij out for not following correct protocol in submitting his petition.

Akakij dies, but his ghost comes back to haunt Petersburg streets, and especially to frighten Petersburg bureaucrats, from whose backs the ghost tears away overcoats.. shaking a fist that was the size of a civil servant's head.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, another Petersburg poet rises from the mist, Андрей Белый, author of the symbolist prose manifesto, Петербург. So perhaps the gender mystics were right after all. There is something there.

gmc