Wie das Stottern aus Gogol's Mantel kam. Bemerkungen zum Stottern von Michail Gasparov, Jurij Lotman und Vladimir Sorokin

When writers have to cope with stuttering, is this speech-language deficiency of pertinence for their literary work? A lack of fluency in
speaking can be simply compensated by writing. In the case of three prominent writers from Russia, the historian and prominent theorist
of literature and culture, Iurii Lotman, the specialist in Classics and history of European versification, Mikhail Gasparov and the conceptualist
writer Vladimir Sorokin their more or less severe stuttering is not very well known. Nonetheless, these personalities have not concealed
their handicap in speech but decided to speak out in public. The paper discusses this remarkable decision for speaking with stutter
with respect to Nikolai Gogol’s story The Overcoat/Shinel’ (1842). This story has first been read in a key of social criticism but since
Boris Eichenbaum’s famous study „How Gogol’s Overcoat is Made“(1918) the peculiarities of the narrator’s speech are under scrutiny.
Similarly to Eichenbaum who stressed the narrator’s discourse instead of the story’s content this contribution to ‘Art and Disability’ hazards
to discuss the speech impediments of these three illustrious Russian hommes de lettres.