The slender black-and-white illustrations, made with pen and ink by a theater design artist Elena Avinova, brilliantly capture the grim backdrop and dehumanizing conditions of the protagonist’s living. Avinova demonstrates a genuine page layout that reaches for the perfect pace of the storyline perception and elegantly sets accents in Gogol’s text. Her characters are inherent to the 19th century Petersburg, yet totally recognizable for the new younger generation of readers. The portrait of Akakiy Akakievich himself is both grotesque and totally sympathetic, and, quite in tune with the fantastic elements in Gogol’s story, introduces the arrival of a modern-time super-hero of a bizarre St Petersburg type.

Natalia Osipova offers an accurate and precise adaptation of the original Gogol’s text that preserves the essence of this literary masterpiece, with only a few abridgments for the sake of conforming to the form’s requirements, and helps the artist to come with a fresh take on this celebrated classic story.

The Overcoat becomes the first title in the series of the Graphic Adaptations of the Greatest Russian Short Stories, made by Elena Avinova and Natalia Osipova. The whole series will include Alexander Pushkin’s The Undertaker, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Heavenly Christmas Tree, Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.