More than anyone, it was Gogol who fixed the city's image as an alienating place. As a young 'Ukrainian writer' struggling to survive in the capital, Gogol lived among the petty clerks whose literary alter egos fill his Tales of Petersburg (1842). These are sad and lonely figures, crushed by the city's oppressive atmosphere and doomed, for the most part, to die untimely deaths, like Pushkin's Evgeny in The Bronze Horseman. Gogol's Petersburg is a city of illusions and deceit. 'Oh have no faith in this Nevsky Prospekt… It is all deception, a dream, nothing is what it seems!' he warns in 'Nevsky Prospekt', the first of the Tales of Petersburg. 'Nevsky Prospekt deceives at all hours of the day, but the worst time of all is night, when the entire city becomes a welter of noise and flashing lights… and when the Devil himself is abroad, kindling the street-lamps with one purpose only: to show everything in a false light.'24 Hidden in the shadows of this glittering parade, Gogol's 'little men' scuttle between their offices in vast ministerial buildings and the equally soulless tenement apartments in which they live - alone, of course. Gogol's Petersburg is a ghostly image of the real city, a nightmare vision of a world deprived of grace, where only human greed and vanity can thrive. In 'The Overcoat', the last of the Tales, the humble civil servant Akaky Akakievich is forced to scrimp and save to replace his threadbare overcoat that has long become the joke of his fashionable seniors in the ministry. The new coat restores his sense of pride and individual worth: it becomes a symbol of his acceptance by his peers, who throw a champagne party in celebration. But he is robbed of the prized fur while walking home across a dark and 'endless square'. His efforts to retrieve it by appealing to an important Personage' come to naught. He becomes ill and dies,
a tragic figure crushed by a cold and uncaring society. But Akaky's ghost walks the streets of Petersburg. One night it haunts the Important Personage and robs him of his coat.
Dostoevsky said that the whole of Russian literature 'came out from underneath Gogol's "Overcoat"',25 His own early tales, especially The Double (1846), are very Gogolesque, although in later works, such as Crime and Punishment (1866), he adds an important psychological dimension to the capital's topography. Dostoevsky creates his unreal city through the diseased mental world of his characters, so that it becomes 'fantastically real'.26 In the minds of dreamers like Raskol-nikov, fantasy becomes reality, and life becomes a game in which any action, even murder, can be justified. Here is a place where human feelings are perverted and destroyed by human isolation and rationality. Dostoevsky's Petersburg is full of dreamers, a fact which he explained by the city's cramped conditions, by the frequent mists and fog which came in from the sea, by the icy rain and drizzle which made people sick. This was a place of fevered dreams and weird hallucinations, of nerves worn thin by the sleepless White Nights of the northern summer when dreamland and the real world became blurred. Dostoevsky himself was not immune to such flights of fantasy. In 1861 he recalled a 'vision of the Neva' which he himself had had in the early 1840s and included in the short story 'A Weak Heart' (1841). Dostoevsky claimed that it was the precise moment of his artistic self-discovery:
I remember once on a wintry January evening I was hurrying home from the Vyborg side… When I reached the Neva, I stopped for a minute and threw a piercing glance along the river into the smoky, frostily dim distance, which had suddenly turned crimson with the last purple of a sunset… Frozen steam poured from tired horses, from running people. The taut air quivered at the slightest sound, and columns of smoke like giants rose from all the roofs on both embankments and rushed upward through the cold sky, twining and untwining on the way, so that it seemed new buildings were rising above the old ones, a new city was forming in the air… It seemed as if all that world, with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their habitations, the refuges of the poor, or the gilded palaces for the comfort of the powerful of this world, was at that twilight hour like a fantastic vision of fairyland, like a
dream which in its turn would vanish and pass away like vapour in the dark blue sky.27
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