The Nose

Summary

"The Nose" is a comic story by Nikolai Gogol, written in 1835–1836 and published in 1836 in The Contemporary, the literary journal founded by Alexander Pushkin. It is one of Gogol's Petersburg tales, a group of stories set in the Russian capital that also includes "The Overcoat". On the morning of 25 March a St. Petersburg barber, Ivan Jakovlevitch, cuts open a fresh loaf at breakfast and finds a nose inside it. He recognizes it as the nose of one of his customers, Kovaloff, and his furious wife orders him out of the house with it. After trying in vain to lose it in the street, he drops it from a bridge into the river, only to be called over by a police officer. That same morning Kovaloff, a vain official of middle rank who likes to be called "Major", wakes to find a smooth, flat space where his nose should be. Hurrying through the streets with a handkerchief over his face, he sees his own nose step out of a carriage dressed as a State Councillor, a rank far above his own. When he timidly approaches it, the nose coolly insists that it is a person in its own right and turns away. Kovaloff tries to place a newspaper advertisement for his lost nose and to get help from a police commissary, but no one will take his problem seriously, and rumors of a nose strolling about the city draw crowds of the curious. Eventually a police officer returns the nose, caught as it was getting into a coach for Riga with a passport made out in an official's name, but it will not stay on Kovaloff's face, and a doctor declines to reattach it. Then, on 7 April, Kovaloff wakes to find it back in place as though nothing had happened, and he resumes his strutting walks along the Nevsky Avenue. The narrator closes by admitting that a good deal of the story looks improbable, then insists that such things do happen, now and then. Under its absurd surface, the story mocks a society obsessed with rank, appearance and reputation, in which a man without a nose fears above all for his career and his prospects of marriage. Its blend of fantasy and everyday detail made it a forerunner of later absurdist fiction, and Shostakovich turned it into an opera in 1930.

Top Lessons

• Vanity and rank

  Kovaloff cares more about his title, his whiskers and his chances of a good marriage than about anything else. Gogol shows how absurd a life becomes when it is built on appearances.

• Satire through the absurd

  Gogol never explains how the nose escaped; instead every character reacts to the impossible with ordinary bureaucratic fussiness. The joke exposes the habits of a society more concerned with procedure and reputation than with truth.

• Reading a narrator

  The narrator begins as a matter-of-fact reporter and ends by admitting that a good deal of the story looks improbable. Readers learn to watch how a storyteller's voice shapes the meaning of what he tells.

• For the Christian reader

  Gogol, a devout Orthodox believer in his later years, aims his comedy at pride: a man who thinks himself important is undone by losing a single, ridiculous part of himself. The story is a comic picture of the vanity Scripture warns against, and it invites readers to laugh at their own concern for status.

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