Şinel

A minor clerk in Petersburg saves for months to replace his threadbare overcoat, finally gets one, and has it stolen almost immediately. Nobody in the bureaucracy will help him.

Dostoevsky's generation took it as the beginning of Russian realism — the line about all of them having come out from under Gogol's overcoat is usually attributed to him. The tone is the strange part: comic, digressive, and then suddenly not.