The Overcoat

Akaky Akalievich is an underpaid governmental clerk who, the humblest of his kind and the butt of cruel jokes by his fellow workers, manages to subsist on his tiny salary, nursing the single ambition of saving enough for a new overcoat. After excessive privation, he saves enough to have a tailor make him an expensive new one, only to have it stolen in the middle of winter on the first evening he goes out.

In post-revolutionary Russia, a man devotes his entire savings to purchasing a new coat to satisfy his boss. The rest of his life's problems are related to that coat.

After Russia's revolution, a man spends all his money on a new coat to make his boss happy. Everything that goes wrong in his life from then on connects back to that coat.