The Carriage

"The Carriage" (or "The Coach" in some translations; Russian: Коляска) is a 1836 short story by Nikolai Gogol, one of his shortest works. The story centers on the life of a former cavalry officer and landowner near a small Russian town. After reading the story, Anton Chekhov wrote to Alexei Suvorin, "What an artist he is! His 'Carriage' alone is worth two hundred thousand rubles. Sheer delight, nothing less."

Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) is a well-known Russian novelist and short-story writer. He was born and raised in Ukraine and moved to St. Petersburg in 1828. His short story "The Carriage" was published in the first volume of Pushkin’s literary journal The Contemporary in 1836. It is speculated that Gogol wrote the short story to echo Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin, as he mimics Pushkin’s use of anecdotes, irony, and structure in media res. It is classified as one of his Petersburg tales (along with "Nevsky Prospekt", "The Diary of a Madman", "The Nose", "The Overcoat", and "The Portrait"). The Petersburg Tales create a profile of St. Petersburg as the only modern city in imperial Russia. The stories focus on the great administrative city’s indifference to the plight of individuals, describing the personal narratives of people rebelling against its climate.

The story opens in the town of B., where things are drab, depressing and boring until a cavalry regiment moves into the area. Once the regiment is stationed in the town, the area becomes lively, animated, and full of color, with neighboring landowners coming into town frequently to socialize with officers and attend various gatherings and parties. One of the landowners and a chief aristocrat, Pythagoras Chertokutsky, attends a party at the general's house. When the general shows off his beautiful mare to the party attendees, Chertokutsky mentions he has a splendid coach that he paid around four-thousand rubles for, hoping to impress the other guests (although in reality he owns nothing of the sort). The other men express interest in seeing the carriage, so he invites them to dinner on the following day. During the remainder of the general’s party, he gets caught up in playing cards and forgets the time, getting home around four in the morning, drunk. Because of this, he forgets to tell his wife about the party and is roused from sleep when his wife sees some carriages approaching their house. He at once remembers the dinner party that he agreed to host, but has his servants tell everyone that he is gone for the day, going to hide in the coach. The general and his friends are upset by his absence, but wish to see his magnificent coach anyway and go to the carriage house to look at it. They are unimpressed by the ordinary coach that he actually owns and examine it thoroughly, wondering if maybe there is something special hidden inside. They open the apron inside the coach and find Chertokutsky hiding inside. The general simply exclaims "Ah, you are here," slams the door, and covers him up again with the apron.

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