Emerging from Gogol's Overcoat

[Earl Sampson]

>In response to Russel Valentino's question about the source of
>Dostoevsky's supposed statement that "we have all emerged from under
>Gogol's Overcoat": Simon Karlinsky in +The Sexual Labyrinth of
>Nikolai Gogol+ (p. 135) argues that the statement is apocryphal
>and can be traced to the French critic of the Russian novel
>Melchior de Vogue.
>        Steve Baehr

When I was in graduate school I heard the story (also apocryphal, I would
guess) that one of the Formalist critics (Ejkhenbaum? Tynjanov?) once said
that if Dostoevsky actually made that statement, what he should have said
was "We all came out of Gogol's Nose."

Earl Sampson