From the overcoat to the tropics: humiliation and anonymity

Abstract

Starting from Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Overcoat, this essay investigates the figure of the erased subject as an ethical and aesthetic problem reflected in Latin American literature, through a specific focus on Brazilian literature. In Akaky Akakievich, humiliation and anonymity are not exceptional episodes but a structural condition of existence, produced by bureaucratic and social mechanisms of invisibilization. By displacing this figure to Latin American literature, the essay proposes a relationship of resonance rather than direct influence. Characters such as Macabéa, by Clarice Lispector, and Fabiano, by Graciliano Ramos, reaffirm the centrality of minimal lives marked by material precariousness, silencing, and symbolic exclusion. From the Russian administrative cold to the tropics, literature emerges as a privileged space of visibility for subjects whose existence, outside the pages, tends to remain erased.