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Overcoat (left) and topcoat (right) from The Gazette of Fashion, 1872.

An overcoat is a type of long coat intended to be worn as the outermost garment. Overcoats usually extend below the knee, but are sometimes mistakenly referred to as topcoats, which are short coats that end at or above the knees. Topcoats and overcoats together are known as outercoats. Unlike overcoats, topcoats are usually made from lighter weight cloth such as gabardine or covert, while overcoats are made from heavier cloth or fur, because overcoats are more commonly used in winter when warmth is more important.

History of the overcoat[link]

In many countries, coats and gowns reaching below the knee have been worn for centuries, often for formal uses, establishing either social status or as part of a professional or military uniform. In the 17th century, the overcoat became widely stylised and available to the different classes.

In the West, the general profile of overcoats has remained largely unchanged for a long time. During the Regency, the fashion was to have very form-fitting clothes, with sidebodies, waist seams, and a flared skirt. Examples of this included the frock overcoat and paletot. This gradually shifted to the looser styles more common now, typified by the Chesterfield coat, which became popular by the end of the Victorian period.^[1] Until then, most coats were double breasted, but Chesterfields and accompanying styles like the guard's coat were worn in single and double breasted varieties.

More recently, there is a decline in the wearing of full-length overcoats, and double breasted ones are much less common.

Military use of the overcoat[link]

Napoleon, mounted, campaigning in France in 1814, wearing a grey overcoat, by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier.

Overcoats in various forms have been used by militaries since at least the late 18th century, and were especially associated with winter campaigns, such as Napoleon's Russian campaign. The full length overcoat was once again popularised by the use during World War I of the trench coat.

Stereotypically, overcoats used by the army tended to be single-breasted, while navies often used double-breasted overcoats. Overcoats continued to be used as battle dress until the mid 1940s and 1950s, when they were deemed impractical. However, in colder countries, such as the former USSR, they continue to be issued and used. When more efficient clothing and synthetic fibres became readily available, the overcoat began to be phased out even there. However, a recent (2008–2011) attempt to introduce military uniforms made of warm synthetic fibers was made in Russia, it resulted in many soldiers getting frostbites and pneumonia.^[2]

Examples of overcoats[link]

Double-breasted coat, 1876

We note here some of the most common historical overcoats, in roughly chronological order.

	The Greatcoat, a voluminous overcoat with multiple shoulder capes, prominently featured by European militaries, most notably the former Soviet Union
	The Redingote (via French from English riding coat), a long fitted coat for men or women
	The Frock overcoat, a very formal daytime overcoat commonly worn with a frock coat, featuring a waist seam and heavy waist suppression
	The Ulster coat, a working daytime overcoat initially with a cape top covering sleeves, but then without; it evolved to the polo coat after losing its cape
	The Inverness coat, a formal evening or working day overcoat, with winged sleeves
	The Paletot coat, a coat shaped with sidebodies, as a slightly less formal alternative to the frock overcoat
	The Paddock coat, with even less shaping
	The Chesterfield coat, a long overcoat with very little waist suppression; being the equivalent of the 'sack suit' for clothes, it came to be the most important overcoat of the next half-century
	The Covert coat, a classically brown/fawn, straight cut, single breasted country coat that became accepted for wear in the city with a suit as well as with tweed.[3] It has a signature four lines of stitching at the cuffs and hem. It also had a fly front closure and 2 side pockets. The collar is sometimes made of velvet.

See also[link]

• Coat (clothing)
• Overcoat (disambiguation)

Further reading[link]

• The Gentleman's Gazette provides in depth information about the Chesterfield, Paletot, the Covert Coat, the Polo Coat, the Ulster, the British Warm Greatcoat and the Guard's Coat.

References[link]

1. ^ "The Chesterfield Overcoat". Gentleman's Gazette. http://www.gentlemansgazette.com/chesterfield-overcoat/. Retrieved 2012-01-19. 
2. ^ Russian Soldiers Freeze in New Uniforms
3. ^ "The Covert Coat". Gentleman's Gazette. http://www.gentlemansgazette.com/covert-coat/. Retrieved 2012-01-24. 

Jack Clayton (1 March 1921 – 26 February 1995) was a British film director, who specialised in bringing literary works to the screen.

Career[link]

A native of East Sussex, Clayton started his career as a child actor on the 1929 film Dark Red Roses.^[1] He later worked for Alexander Korda's Denham Film Studios and rose from tea boy to assistant director to film editor.

While in service with the Royal Air Force during World War II, Clayton shot his first film, the documentary Naples is a Battlefield (1944), representing the problems in the reconstruction of Naples, the first great city liberated in World War II, ruined after Allied bombing and destruction caused by the retreating Nazis. After the war Clayton became an associate producer on many of Korda's films, then directed the Oscar-winning short The Bespoke Overcoat (1956) based on Wolf Mankowitz's theatrical version (1953) of Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat (1842). In this film Gogol's story is re-located to a clothing warehouse in the East End of London and the ghostly protagonist is a poor Jew.

His first feature was the internationally acclaimed Room at the Top (1959), a harsh indictment of the British class system, which won two Oscars, earned Clayton a Best Director nomination, and was credited with spearheading Britain's movement toward realism in films; in fact that film inaugurated a series of realist films known as the British New Wave, which featured for that time, unusually sincere treatments of sexual mores and introduced a new maturity into British cinema.

Clayton followed with the ghost story The Innocents (1961), based on Henry James The Turn of the Screw, then lay back for several years, establishing a pattern he followed thereafter.

He directed The Pumpkin Eater (1964), Our Mother's House (1967), and then, seven years later, the high-profile American production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1974). But it did not fare well with the critics.

Perhaps in response to its failure, he did not take another assignment for nine years. He filmed Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), the Disney studio production, which fitted more closely with the ideas he had explored earlier, especially in the sense of the exposure of children to evil. But the finished film was a compromise between Disney's insistence on a more commercial version and the original vision of the director. Although the film was well received by critics, it was another disappointment for Clayton.

His last feature film, the British-made The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), featured Maggie Smith as a spinster who struggles with the emptiness of her life; it won Clayton critical plaudits for the first time in many years. He worked with Smith again in 1992 for a television film Memento Mori, based on the novel by Muriel Spark, for which he also co-wrote the screenplay. Like previous ones, that film expressed quietly moving meditations on disappointment and aging.

Personal life[link]

When asked his religion, he replied: "ex-Catholic". He was married to the Israeli actress Haya Harareet until his death.

Notes[link]

References[link]

• World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945–1985. ed. J. Wakeman. pp 224–227. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

External links[link]

• Jack Clayton biography and credits at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Literature on Jack Clayton

Nikolai Gogol
Daguerreotype of Gogol taken in 1845 by Sergey Lvovich Levitsky (1819–1898)
Born	Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-03-31)31 March 1809[1] (N.S.) Sorochyntsi, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Died	4 March 1852(1852-03-04) (aged 42) Moscow, Russian Empire
Occupation	Playwright, short-story writer, and novelist
Nationality	Russian
Ethnicity	Ukrainian
Period	1840–51
Influences Miguel de Cervantes, Alexander Pushkin
Influenced Aleichem, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov,[2] Saramago,[3] Stanislavski, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Andrei Biely
Signature

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Russian: Никола́й Васи́льевич Го́голь, tr. Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol; IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ˈgogəlʲ]; Ukrainian: Мико́ла Васи́льович Го́голь, Mykola Vasyliovych Hohol; 31 March [O.S. 19 March] 1809 – 4 March [O.S. 21 February] 1852^[4]) was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer.^[4]

Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism and the grotesque ("The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat," "Nevsky Prospekt"). His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore.^[5][6] His later writing satirised political corruption in the Russian Empire (The Government Inspector, Dead Souls), leading to his eventual exile. The novel Taras Bulba (1835) and the play Marriage (1842), along with the short stories "Diary of a Madman", "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", "The Portrait" and "The Carriage", round out the tally of his best-known works.

Early life[link]

Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochyntsi,^[4] in Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, present-day Ukraine. His mother was a descendant of Polish landowners. His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, a descendant of Ukrainian Cossacks, belonged to the 'petty gentry', wrote poetry in Ukrainian and Russian, and was an amateur Ukrainian-language playwright, who died when Gogol was 15 years old. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the early nineteenth century, the family spoke Russian as well as Ukrainian. As a child, Gogol helped stage Ukrainian-language plays in his uncle's home theater.^[7]

In 1820 Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nizhyn and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing. He was not popular among his schoolmates, who called him their "mysterious dwarf", but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition. Equally early he developed a talent for mimicry, which later made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor.

In 1828, on leaving school, Gogol came to St Petersburg, full of vague but glowingly ambitious hopes. He had hoped for literary fame, and brought with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life – Hans Küchelgarten. He had it published, at his own expense, under the name of "V. Alov." The magazines he sent it to almost universally derided it. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again.

Gogol was one of the first masters of the short story, alongside Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was in touch with the "literary aristocracy", had a story published in Anton Delvig's Northern Flowers, was taken up by Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and (in 1831) was introduced to Pushkin.

Literary development[link]

Cover of the first edition of The Government Inspector (1836).

In 1831, he brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka), which met with immediate success. He followed it in 1832 with a second volume, and in 1835 by two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod, as well as by two volumes of miscellaneous prose entitled Arabesques. At this time Russian editors and critics such as Nikolai Polevoy and Nikolai Nadezhdin saw in Gogol the emergence of a Ukrainian, rather than Russian, writer, using his works to illustrate supposed differences between Russian and Ukrainian national characters, a fact that has been overlooked in later Russian literary history.^[8] The themes and style of these early prose works by Gogol, as well as his later drama, were similar to the work of Ukrainian writers and dramatists who were his contemporaries and friends, including Hryhory Kvitka-Osnovyanenko and Vasily Narezhny. However, Gogol's satire was much more sophisticated and unconventional.^[9]

At this time, Gogol developed a passion for Ukrainian history and tried to obtain an appointment to the history department at Kiev University. Despite the support of Pushkin and Sergey Uvarov, the Russian minister of education, his appointment was blocked by a Kievan bureaucrat on the grounds that he was unqualified.^[10] His fictional story Taras Bulba, based on the history of Ukrainian cossacks, was the result of this phase in his interests. During this time he also developed a close and life-long friendship with another Ukrainian, the historian and naturalist Mykhaylo Maksymovych.^[11]

In 1834 Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg, a job for which he had no qualifications. He turned in a performance ludicrous enough to warrant satiric treatment in one of his own stories. After an introductory lecture made up of brilliant generalizations which the 'historian' had prudently prepared and memorized, he gave up all pretense at erudition and teaching, missed two lectures out of three, and when he did appear, muttered unintelligibly through his teeth. At the final examination, he sat in utter silence with a black handkerchief wrapped around his head, simulating a toothache, while another professor interrogated the students."^[12] This academic venture proved a failure and he resigned his chair in 1835.

Commemorative plaque in his house in Rome

Between 1832 and 1836 Gogol worked with great energy, and though almost all his work has in one way or another its sources in these four years of contact with Pushkin, he had not yet decided that his ambitions were to be fulfilled by success in literature. During this time, the Russian critics Stepan Shevyrev and Vissarion Belinsky, contradicting earlier critics, reclassified Gogol from a Ukrainian to a Russian writer.^[8] It was only after the presentation, on 19 April 1836, of his comedy The Government Inspector (Revizor) that he finally came to believe in his literary vocation. The comedy, a violent satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, was staged thanks only to the intervention of the emperor, Nicholas I.

From 1836 to 1848 Gogol lived abroad, travelling through Germany and Switzerland. Gogol spent the winter of 1836–1837 in Paris, among Russian expatriates and Polish exiles, frequently meeting the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Bohdan Zaleski. He eventually settled in Rome. For much of the twelve years from 1836 Gogol was in Italy. He studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera. He mingled with Russian and other visitors, and in 1838 met Count Ioseph Vielhorskiy, the 23-year-old son of the official who had brought Gogol's Government Inspector to the attention of the emperor. Vielhorsky was travelling in hopes of curing his tuberculosis. Gogol became deeply attached to the young man and attended him in his illness, but in 1839 Vielhorsky died. Gogol left an account of this time in his Nights at the Villa.

Pushkin's death produced a strong impression on Gogol. His principal work during years following Pushkin's death was the satirical epic Dead Souls. Concurrently, he worked at other tasks – recast Taras Bulba and The Portrait, completed his second comedy, Marriage (Zhenitba), wrote the fragment Rome and his most famous short story, The Overcoat.

In 1841 the first part of Dead Souls was ready, and Gogol took it to Russia to supervise its printing. It appeared in Moscow in 1842, under the title, imposed by the censorship, of The Adventures of Chichikov. The book instantly established his reputation as the greatest prose writer in the language.

Creative decline and death[link]

After the triumph of Dead Souls, Gogol came to be regarded by his contemporaries as a great satirist who lampooned the unseemly sides of Imperial Russia. Little did they know that Dead Souls was but the first part of a planned modern-day counterpart to The Divine Comedy. The first part represented the Inferno; the second part was to depict the gradual purification and transformation of the rogue Chichikov under the influence of virtuous publicans and governors — Purgatory.^[13]

Gogol, painted in 1840.

From Palestine Gogol returned to Russia, and passed his last years in restless movement throughout the country. While visiting the capitals, he stayed with friends such as Mikhail Pogodin and Sergei Aksakov. During this period he also spent much time with his old Ukrainian friends, Maksymovych and Osyp Bodiansky. More importantly, he intensified his relationship with a starets or spiritual elder, Matvey Konstantinovsky, whom he had known for several years. Konstantinovsky seems to have strengthened in Gogol the fear of perdition by insisting on the sinfulness of all his imaginative work. His health was undermined by exaggerated ascetic practices and he fell into a state of deep depression. On the night of 24 February 1852, he burned some of his manuscripts, which contained most of the second part of Dead Souls. He explained this as a mistake, a practical joke played on him by the Devil. Soon thereafter he took to bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later.

Gogol was mourned in the Saint Tatiana church at the Moscow University before his burial and then buried at the Danilov Monastery, close to his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov. In 1931 Moscow authorities decided to demolish the monastery and had his remains transferred to the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Gogol's grave at the Novodevichy Cemetery

His body was discovered lying face down; which gave rise to the story that Gogol had been buried alive. A Soviet critic even cut a part of his jacket to use as a binding for his copy of Dead Souls. A piece of rock which used to stand on his grave at the Danilov was reused for the tomb of Gogol's admirer Mikhail Bulgakov.

The first Gogol monument in Moscow was a Symbolist statue on Arbat Square, which represented the sculptor Nikolay Andreyev's idea of Gogol, rather than the real man.^[14] Unveiled in 1909, the statue was praised by Ilya Repin and Leo Tolstoy as an outstanding projection of Gogol's tortured personality. Joseph Stalin did not like it, however, and the statue was replaced by a more orthodox Socialist Realism monument in 1952. It took enormous efforts to save Andreyev's original work from destruction; it now stands in front of the house where Gogol died.^[15]

Style[link]

D.S. Mirsky characterized Gogol's universe as "one of the most marvellous, unexpected — in the strictest sense, original^[16] — worlds ever created by an artist of words".^[17]

The other main characteristic of Gogol's writing is his impressionist vision of reality and people. He saw the outer world romantically metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, A Terrible Vengeance and A Bewitched Place. His pictures of nature are strange mounds of detail heaped on detail, resulting in an unconnected chaos of things. His people are caricatures, drawn with the method of the caricaturist — which is to exaggerate salient features and to reduce them to geometrical pattern. But these cartoons have a convincingness, a truthfulness, and inevitability — attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality — that seems to beggar the visible world itself.^[18]

The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the untranslatable Russian word poshlost', which is perhaps best rendered as "self-satisfied inferiority", moral and spiritual, widespread in some group or society (from Russian, poshlo, meaning "went"). Like Sterne before him, Gogol was a great destroyer of prohibitions and romantic illusions. It was he who undermined Russian Romanticism by making vulgarity reign where only the sublime and the beautiful had reigned.^[19] "Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror."^[20] His stories often interweave pathos and mockery, while "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" begins as a merry farce and ends with the famous dictum, "It is dull in this world, gentlemen!"

Politics[link]

Gogol was stunned when The Government Inspector came to be interpreted by many, despite Nicholas I's patronage of the play, as an indictment of Tsarism. In reality, Gogol himself was an adherent of the Slavophile movement and believed in a divinely inspired mission for both the House of Romanov and the Russian Orthodox Church. Similarly to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gogol sharply disagreed with those Russians who preached Constitutional Monarchy and the Disestablishment of the Orthodox Church.

After defending Autocracy, Serfdom, and Orthodoxy in his book Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends, Gogol was attacked by his former patron Vissarion Belinsky. The first Russian intellectual to publicly preach the economic theories of Karl Marx, Belinsky accused Gogol of betraying his readership by defending the status quo.

Influence and interpretations[link]

The first Gogol memorial in Russia (an impressionistic statue by Nikolay Andreyev, 1909).

A more conventional statue of Gogol at the Villa Borghese, Rome.

Even before the publication of Dead Souls, Belinsky recognized Gogol as the first realist writer in the language and the head of the Natural School, to which he also assigned such younger or lesser authors as Goncharov, Turgenev, Dmitry Grigorovich, Vladimir Dahl and Vladimir Sollogub. Gogol himself seemed to be skeptical about the existence of such a literary movement. Although he recognized "several young writers" who "have shown a particular desire to observe real life", he upbraided the deficient composition and style of their works.^[21] Nevertheless, subsequent generations of radical critics celebrated Gogol (the author in whose world a nose roams the streets of the Russian capital) as a great realist, a reputation decried by the Encyclopædia Britannica as "the triumph of Gogolesque irony."^[22]

The period of modernism saw a revival of interest in and a change of attitude towards Gogol's work. One of the pioneering works of Russian formalism was Eichenbaum's reappraisal of The Overcoat. In the 1920s, a group of Russian short story writers, known as the Serapion Brothers, placed Gogol among their precursors and consciously sought to imitate his techniques. The leading novelists of the period – notably Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov – also admired Gogol and followed in his footsteps. In 1926, Vsevolod Meyerhold staged The Government Inspector as a "comedy of the absurd situation", revealing to his fascinated spectators a corrupt world of endless self-deception. In 1934, Andrei Bely published the most meticulous study of Gogol's literary techniques up to that date, in which he analyzed the colours prevalent in Gogol's work depending on the period, his impressionistic use of verbs, expressive discontinuity of his syntax, complicated rhythmical patterns of his sentences, and many other secrets of his craft. Based on this work, Vladimir Nabokov published a summary account of Gogol's masterpieces in 1944.

The house in Moscow where Gogol died. The building contains the fireplace where he burned the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls.

Gogol's impact on Russian literature has been enduring, yet his works have been appreciated differently by various critics. Belinsky, for instance, berated his horror stories as "moribund, monstrous works", while Andrei Bely counted them among his most stylistically daring creations. Nabokov especially admired Dead Souls, The Government Inspector, and The Overcoat as works of genius, proclaiming that "when, as in his immortal ‘The Overcoat,’ Gogol really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.” ^[23] The Overcoat was traditionally interpreted as a masterpiece of "humanitarian realism", but Nabokov and some other attentive readers argued that "holes in the language" make the story susceptible to interpretation as a supernatural tale about a ghostly double of a "small man."^[24] Of all Gogol's stories, The Nose has stubbornly defied all abstruse interpretations: D.S. Mirsky declared it "a piece of sheer play, almost sheer nonsense."

Gogol's oeuvre has also had a large impact on Russia's non-literary culture, and his stories have been adapted numerous times into opera and film. Russian Composer Alfred Schnittke wrote the eight part Gogol Suite as incidental music to The Government Inspector performed as a play, and composer Dmitri Shostakovich set The Nose as his first opera in 1930, despite the peculiar choice of subject for what was meant to initiate the great tradition of Soviet opera.^[25] Most recently, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Gogol's birth, Vienna's renowned Theater an der Wien commissioned music and libretto for a full length opera on the life of Gogol from Russian composer and writer Lera Auerbach.^[26]

Gogol burning the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls by Ilya Repin

Some attention has also been given to the apparent anti-Semitism in Gogol's writings, as well as those of his contemporary, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.^[27] Felix Dreizin and David Guaspari, for example, in their The Russian Soul and the Jew: Essays in Literary Ethnocentricis discuss "the significance of the Jewish characters and the negative image of the Ukrainian Jewish community in Gogol's novel Taras Bulba, pointing out Gogol's attachment to anti-Jewish prejudices prevalent in Russian and Ukrainian culture."^[28] In Leon Poliakov's The History of Antisemitism, the author mentions that "The 'Yankel' from Taras Bulba indeed became the archetypal Jew in Russian literature. Gogol painted him as supremely exploitative, cowardly, and repulsive, albeit capable of gratitude. But it seems perfectly natural in the story that he and his cohorts be drowned in the Dniper by the Cossack lords. Above all, Yankel is ridiculous, and the image of the plucked chicken that Gogol used has made the rounds of great Russian authors."^[29]

Despite his problematic portrayal of Jewish characters, Gogol left a powerful impression even on Jewish writers who inherited his literary legacy. Amelia Glaser has noted the influence of Gogol's literary innovations on Sholem Aleichem, who "chose to model much of his writing, and even his appearance, on Gogol... What Sholem Aleichem was borrowing from Gogol was a rural East European landscape that may have been dangerous, but could unite readers through the power of collective memory. He also learned from Gogol to soften this danger through laughter, and he often rewrites Gogol's Jewish characters, correcting anti-Semitic stereotypes and narrating history from a Jewish perspective."^[30]

Gogol in popular culture[link]

Postage stamp, Russia, 2009. See also: Gogol in philately, Russian Wikipedia

• Gogol has been featured many times on Russian and Soviet postage stamps; he is also well-represented on stamps worldwide.^{[31][32][33][34][35]}
• Several commemorative coins have been issued from Russia and the USSR. On 19 March 2009, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Gogol.^[36]
• Streets have been named after Gogol in Moscow, Lipetsk, Odessa, Myrhorod, Krasnodar, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Penza, Petrozavodsk, Riga, Bratislava, Harbin and many other towns and cities.
• Gogol is referenced multiple times in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Chekhov's The Seagull.
• More than 35 films have been based on Gogol's work, the most recent being The Girl in the White Coat (2011).
• BBC Radio 4 made a series of six Gogol short stories, entitled Three Ivans, Two Aunts and an Overcoat (2002, adaptations by Jim Poyser).
• In music, the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is named after Gogol.
• A song by Joy Division, "Dead Souls" (1980), is named after his novel.
• The band "Moon&Melody" performed a musical version of Nikolai Gogol's Viy (story) at the "Museum für Sepulkralkultur", Kassel, Germany (2011).
• James Bond's competitor (and occasional ally) is named General Gogol.
• Gogolfest is the annual multidisciplinary international festival of contemporary art held in Kiev, Ukraine.
• Gogol is the name of a Russian criminal organization in the TV series Nikita.
• The protagonist of the novel The Namesake, Gogol Ganguli, is named after Nikolai Gogol.

See also[link]

• Nikolai Gogol bibliography

Notes and references[link]

 This article incorporates text from D.S. Mirsky's "A History of Russian Literature" (1926-27), a publication now in the public domain.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Nikolai Gogol

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nikolai Gogol

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Nikolai Gogol

• Works by Nikolai Gogol at Project Gutenberg
• Gogol : Magical realism
• Some photos of places and statues that are reminiscent of Gogol and his work
• Biography at kirjasto.sci.fi
• Nikolay Gogol in Encyclopædia Britannica
• Works by or about Nikolai Gogol in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

v t e Works by Nikolai Gogol Novels Dead Souls Taras Bulba Plays The Government Inspector Marriage The Gamblers Short story collections Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka Mirgorod Arabesques Short stories Preface to Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka "The Fair at Sorochyntsi" "St. John's Eve" "May Night, or the Drowned Maiden" "The Lost Letter: A Tale Told by the Sexton of the N...Church" "Christmas Eve" "A Terrible Vengeance" "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt" "A Bewitched Place" "The Old World Landowners" "Taras Bulba" "Viy" "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" "The Portrait" "A Chapter from an Historical Novel" "Nevsky Prospect" "The Prisoner" "Diary of a Madman" "The Nose" "The Carriage" "The Overcoat" Poetry Ode to Italy Hans Küchelgarten Essays "Woman" Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends Meditations on the Divine Liturgy Bibliography

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (January 2011)

Ruth Etting (November 23, 1897 — September 24, 1978) was an American singing star and actress of the 1920s and 1930s, who had over 60 hit recordings and worked in stage, radio, and film. She is known as "America's sweetheart of song". Her signature tunes were "Shine On Harvest Moon", "Ten Cents a Dance" and "Love Me or Leave Me". Her other popular recordings included "Button Up Your Overcoat", "Mean to Me", "Exactly Like You" and "Shaking the Blues Away".

Biography[link]

Ruth Etting was born in David City, Nebraska in 1897 to Alfred and Winifred (née Kleinhan) Etting. On her mother's death when she was five years old, she went to live with her paternal grandparents, George and Hannah Etting. Alfred Etting remarried and moved away from David City and largely out of his daughter's life.^[1]

Ruth Etting left David City at the age of seventeen to attend art school in Chicago. Her job designing costumes at the Marigold Gardens nightclub led to employment singing and dancing in the chorus there. She became a featured vocalist at the nightclub, and married gangster Martin "Moe the Gimp" Snyder on July 12, 1922. He managed her career, booking radio appearances, and eventually had her signed to an exclusive recording contract with Columbia Records. She made her Broadway debut in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. She went on to appear in a number of other hit shows in rapid succession, including Simple Simon and Whoopee!. In Hollywood, she made a long series of movie shorts between 1929 and 1936, and three feature movies in 1933 and 1934. In 1936, she appeared in London in Ray Henderson's Transatlantic Rhythm.^{[citation needed]}

Personal life[link]

Etting divorced Moe Snyder on November 30, 1937, aged 40. She fell in love with her pianist, Myrl Alderman, but in 1938 he was shot and injured by her ex-husband. Snyder was convicted of attempted murder, but released on appeal after one year in jail. Etting married Alderman, who was almost a decade her junior, in December 1938. The scandal of the sensational trial in Los Angeles effectively ended her career, though she briefly had a radio show in 1947. Alderman died on November 16, 1966.

Death[link]

Ruth Etting died in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1978, aged 80. She had no children.

Legacy[link]

Her life was the basis for the fictionalized 1955 film, Love Me or Leave Me, which starred Doris Day (as Etting) and James Cagney (as Snyder).

Broadway[link]

• Ziegfeld Follies of 1927 — in which she introduced Irving Berlin's "Shaking The Blues Away"
• Whoopee! (1928) — in which she introduced "Love Me or Leave Me"
• Nine-Fifteen Revue (1929) — in which she introduced "Get Happy"
• Simple Simon (1930) — in which she introduced "Ten Cents a Dance"
• Ziegfeld Follies of 1931^{[citation needed]}

Motion picture appearances[link]

Short films[link]

• The Book of Lovers − 1929
• Roseland − 1930
• One Good Turn − 1930
• Broadway's Like That − 1930
• Words & Music − 1931
• Stage Struck − 1931
• Radio Salutes − 1931
• Old Lace − 1931
• A Modern Cinderella − 1932
• A Regular Trouper − 1932
• A Mail Bride − 1932
• Artistic Temper − 1932
• Bye-Gones − 1933
• Along Came Ruth − 1933
• Crashing the Gate − 1933
• California Weather − 1933
• Knee Deep in Music − 1933
• A Torch Tango − 1934
• The Song of Fame − 1934
• Derby Decade − 1934
• Southern Style − 1934
• Bandits and Ballads − 1934
• An Old Spanish Onion − 1935
• Ticket or Leave It − 1935
• Tuned Out − 1935
• Alladin from Manhattan − 1936
• Melody in May − 1936
• Sleepy Time − 1936

Feature films[link]

• Roman Scandals − 1933, her breakthrough film, which starred Eddie Cantor and Gloria Stuart
• Mr. Broadway − 1933, as herself
• Gift of Gab − 1934
• Hips, Hips, Hooray! − 1934

Featured Songs, Bioshock 2[link]

• Ten Cents a Dance −2010

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Official Ruth Etting website
• Ruth Etting at the Internet Movie Database
• Ruth Etting at the Internet Broadway Database
• Ruth Etting at Find a Grave

Simms Taback (February 13, 1932 – December 25, 2011) was an American author, graphic artist, and illustrator and winner of the Caldecott Medal. Taback has illustrated over 35 books, including the Caldecott Medal winning Joseph Had a Little Overcoat and the Caldecott Honor book There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.^[1]

Taback graduated from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and served in the United States Army. He was a designer for CBS Records and The New York Times. He was the founder and president of the Illustrators Guild (later the New York Graphic Artists Guild) and taught art at the School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University.

Taback designed the first McDonalds Happy Meal box in 1977. He died in 2011 of pancreatic cancer.^[2][3]

Books[link]

The following is a partial list of Simms Taback books:

• I Miss You Every Day
• This is the house that Jack built (2004) based on the nursery rhyme
• Joseph Had a Little Overcoat (2000)
• There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (1998) based on the children's song
• Kibitzers and Fools

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official Simms Taback Website
• Official Caldecott Website
• Creative Parents Interview
• The Horn Book interview with Simms Taback