One of Gogol's most bitter and brilliant jokes is in the name and patronymic of the classic "little man," the protagonist of his story The Overcoat. Akakia, as we know, was called by the Byzantines as the attribute of the ceremonial royal vestment - a silk roll of ashes. It was supposed to remind the first persons of the Orthodox Empire and other participants of the ceremonies of the perishable nature of the earthly blessings, the fatality of fate and the transience of life.
In nature there is a similar allegory. As the monarch carries the ashes, so the mollusk carries the future crypt. Akaki Akakievich patches the only old overcoat of the "eternal titular counselor" for life by cutting off the collar fabric. And one of the oldest mollusks, orthoceras, is adding new cells to its "home" as it grows.
To be more precise, it has been living on Earth since the beginning of the Paleozoic era, for about 270 million years. The literal translation of its name is straight horn. The cone-shaped shells of these animals are up to two meters long. The mollusk itself peeked out from the wide end of the cone. That's where its mortal body remained after its life. To fossilize.
Technically, the shell of orthoceras resembles a jet engine. The chambers are separated from each other by partitions. Through them runs a tube through which the animal released water under pressure. As if it wanted to break out of the crypt, but its muscular weight is tightly attached to the inner wall. All efforts are in vain, one can move only together with the shell.
Gogol sneers about the "grafted" name and the fate of his hero in the first pages of The Overcoat:
"The parent was presented with a choice of any of the three [names]: Moccia, Sossia, or to name the child in the name of the martyr Hozdazat.
<...> [Next, the calendar was opened at random, and the names Triphilius, Dula, Varahasius, Pausicachius, and Vakhtisius came up].
"Well, I see," said the old woman, "that this is his fate. Already if so, let him be called as his father was. His father was Akaki, so let his son be Akaki.
It's easier to enter the cycle of fatalism than to get out. The Greeks remembered this even before Byzantium. An example of this is the Royal mound of the times of the Bosporan Kingdom near Kerch. The architecture of the triangular arch creates an optical illusion. From the outside it seems that you can reach the inner space of the structure with just a few steps. From the inside the exit looks distant, as in upside-down binoculars.
The line of allegories from Bosporan architects and Byzantine theologians to Gogol's "Overcoat" is continued by the creative union of Russian cartoonists Yuri Norstein and Francesca Yarbusova. In 1981, they undertook a 60-minute adaptation of The Overcoat. A fragment of the forthcoming film had already won the first prize at the Montreal Animation Competition, but the project as a whole was still incomplete. Only about half of the announced time frame has been shot. The longest filming process in the history of world animation. The image of Akaki Akakievich was so deep, that the movement from the idea to the finished product has turned into a leisurely construction of a clam shell. It is not possible to drop it.
By the way, the artistic value of orthoceras is not only metaphorical. Pieces of rock with inclusions of these fossils are worth their weight in gold for the sculptor. There is such a slab with embossed protruding shells in the exposition of the Mining Museum. A perfect tombstone for Gogol's hero.
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