"The Nose" by Nikolai Gogol
1.18.22
The Absurdity of “The Nose”
You’re a barber. One morning, instead of coffee, you ask your wife for bread (because you know you’ll never have both at the same time). While slicing the bread, you find a nose. Someone’s nose. A nose in the bread!
As a barber you look at a lot of noses. For some reason you have a tendency to pinch your customer’s noses between your fingers, kind of like that game “got your nose” except that game doesn’t exist in your world because you are a Russian barber, and the Russia you live in is old enough to have serfs. Serfs is another word for slaves. You don’t have a serf. You don’t even have clean hands. One of your customers, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, who likes to call himself “Major,” has a nose exactly like the nose you’ve found.
It’s his fucking nose. You’ve found his nose in your bread.
What do you do? Well, you’re a barber, but you’re also, “like any self-respecting Russian Artisan…a drunkard.” You don your dirty piebald jacket with strings where the buttons used to be, wrap the nose in a rag, and make haste for somewhere to toss the nose.
You end up at St. Isaac’s Bridge, kinda by accident. You keep running into people, and this prevents you from surreptitiously dropping the rag and nose on the ground, or shoving it under something. Apparently that’s what people do with noses they find in their morning bread?
You throw the nose off the bridge as a last resort. A cop sees you and arrests you. He’s immune to your compliments and bribes.
Meanwhile your customer, the Major, wakes up. He seems to have a serf? He asks the serf for a small mirror (though in the story the person he asks is not named, but is kept invisible. Maybe because serfs were viewed as less than human, even by many lovers and writers of literature). When Kovalyov look in the mirror he’s horrified. His nose is gone. One would think a missing nose would be grotesque and bloody, but that spot where his nose used to be is “flat as a pancake”.
Thus begins “The Nose.”
I’ve read this story many times over the span of a couple decades and with each reading I develop a fresh understanding. In the past I’ve taken this story pretty seriously. It’s literature. It means something. But this time was different.
I appreciated the absurdity and let it be funny and weird and absolutely mysterious and almost meaningless in it’s hilarity and surrealism. The meaning is the absurdity and meaninglessness. Russian society in those days was absolutely absurd, its rules meaningless and yet irrevocably powerful. People’s social standings and appearances dictated their social standing. More than that, their humanity.
The last time I read this story was in a class with George Saunders. He has a great book called A Swim In A Pond In The Rain which is meant to mimic his “Russian stories” class, the class I was in; the class he taught at Syracuse. He also has his own Substack now, which is all about stories, but more geared towards writers.
“The Nose” is a wonderful example of the surrealism Gogol was most known for. He is the most famous surrealist Russian writer of his time, and yet his surrealism was incognito. How often in this story does the reader find themselves casually believing the Kovalyov’s search for his nose is real? That losing a nose is a thing that actually could happen? I’m reminded of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Though Kafka was Czech, the two writers dealt with the absurd, albeit in very different ways.
“The basic difference [between Gogol and Kafka] is that Kafka makes illusion real while Gogol makes reality illusory—the former depicts the reality of the absurd, the latter the absurdity of the real”. - R. Karst.
Don’t worry, we’ll read some Kafka.
So, in what ways did you notice Gogol “make reality illusory?”
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