Nikolai Gogol: The Russian Writer You Should All Know and Read
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) is known for several great works, including the play The Government Inspector, the novel Dead Souls, and short stories including “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.” However, after publishing Dead Souls and “The Overcoat” in 1842, Gogol did not have any more artistic success. In his influential book-length study of Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov suggests a reason why Gogol suffered a creative drop-off in the last decade of his life: “What he was really trying to do was to write something that would please both Gogol the artist and Gogol the monk.” Gogol’s decline remains a mystery that some critics attempt to resolve by seeing Gogol’s art and Gogol’s Christian faith at odds with each other, resulting in a “Divided Soul,” as Henri Troyat’s biography of Gogol is titled.
A view more respectful of Gogol’s religion—and one which Gogol himself maintained, even during the last decade of his life—is that Gogol’s art and Gogol’s faith were never separated; even the fictional works from his most productive period reflect a rich Christian vision. As Jesse Zeldin notes in Nikolai Gogol’s Quest for Beauty, “the concentration that we find in [Gogol’s] later writings is part of an attempt to clarify the vision he had pursued in his fiction, for to Gogol the aesthetic and the religious were not separate categories; they were in reality one—the Kingdom of God was the Kingdom of Beauty.” Nabokov’s separation of Gogol’s aesthetics from his faith is therefore a false dichotomy.
Gogol’s best work conveys a longing for the embodiment of beauty and a prophetic message against values alien to a Christian society. Despite Gogol’s tragically short life, his work leaves a legacy of reflection on beauty and the Incarnation—matters that have practical applications for the way we live.
Overview of “The Nose”
In 1836, Gogol’s friend Alexander Pushkin published “The Nose” in The Contemporary, and Gogol revised it in 1842 for publication in his Collected Works. The story consists of three parts.
In the first part, Ivan Yakovlevich, a barber, wakes up on March 25 (the exact day is important to note) and finds a nose in a roll his wife just baked. Yakovlevich’s wife accuses him of being a drunkard and of cutting off his customer’s nose. To his horror, Yakovlevich does indeed recognize the nose: it belongs to “Major” Kovalyov, a Collegiate Assessor (the 8th rank in the Russian Table of Ranks). Kovalyov is a customer that Yakovlevich shaves twice a week. Yakovlevich goes out and attempts to drop the severed nose into the Neva River, where he is apprehended by a policeman. The narrator concludes the section, “But at this point proceedings become enveloped in a fog, and we know absolutely nothing of what ensued.” (Note: I am quoting Christopher English’s translation of “The Nose” from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Gogol’s Plays and Petersburg Tales).
In the second part, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov wakes up and finds a flat space on his face where his nose had been. Walking down the street with a handkerchief over his face, Kovalyov sees his nose wearing the uniform of a State Councilor – meaning that Kovalyov’s nose now holds a rank three ranks above that of Kovalyov! Kovalyov follows the nose into the Kazan Cathedral and sees that the nose is praying. When Kovalyov confronts the nose, the nose acts like he has never met Kovalyov. The nose claims, “I am a person in my own right,” continues praying, and then leaves while Kovalyov is momentarily distracted by gazing at an attractive woman.
After considering how to handle his problem, Kovalyov decides to place an ad in the newspaper. The newspaperman insults Kovalyov by refusing to place the ad and then further outrages him by offering him snuff, which, of course, he, having no nose, cannot sniff.
In his next attempt to solve his problem, Kovalyov receives an even more abrupt dismissal when he seeks help from the police superintendent. Back home, Kovalyov cries out, “My God, oh my God! What have I done to deserve this? If only I had lost an arm or a leg—it would have been far better; or even my ears—that would have been hard, yet I could have borne it; but without his nose a man is nothing: neither man nor beast, but God knows what!”
Kovalyov begins to suspect that his noseless condition was caused by the mother of a girl whom he had flirted with but would not marry. He speculates that the girl’s mother may have hired a witch. Then a police officer shows up at Kovalyov’s residence with his nose wrapped in paper. Another problem emerges: Kovalyov cannot get the severed nose to reattach to his face; neither can a doctor that he calls in. He writes the mother of the girl, demanding that the nose be restored to its place. In a return letter, the mother denies involvement but continues expressing her desire for Kovalyov to marry her daughter.
The third section begins on April 7. Kovalyov wakes up to find his nose properly attached to his face. Kovalyov visits his barber, Yakovlevich, and urges the barber to be careful with his nose. After being reassured that his nose is back to normal, Kovalyov resumes his affairs “as if nothing had ever happened.”
The Challenge of Interpreting “The Nose”: A Critique of Pride?
At the conclusion of “The Nose,” the narrator attempts to capture the thoughts that many readers have as they encounter the story: “Only now, when we ponder the entire story, do we see that it contains much that is highly implausible.” But we readers may push back: “‘Only now,’ narrator? Certainly, we knew that the plot was ‘implausible’ from the start!” Many commentators have noted that Gogol’s narrator is not quite reliable and highly idiosyncratic; this sort of narration in Russian literature is called skaz.
So Gogol’s narrator stumbles in trying to make sense of things. After pointing out some of the story’s incongruities, the narrator takes ironic aim at the author: “But stranger still, and hardest of all to understand, is how authors could take such incidents as their subject-matter. I am forced to admit I find this quite incomprehensible, I just . . . No, I simply do not understand. First, there is absolutely no benefit to the nation; secondly . . . no, and there’s no benefit secondly either. I simply do not know what to make of it.” The narrator’s perplexity invites us as readers to “make something” of this story.
Over the years, many readers and scholars have made something of “The Nose.” Vladimir Nabokov alludes to how “[a] Freudian might suggest that in Gogol’s topsy-turvy world human beings are turned upside down . . . so that the part of the nose is played by some other organ and vice-versa.” Nabokov also notes that Gogol lived in a culture where there were “hundreds of Russian proverbs and sayings that revolve around the nose. We hang it in dejection, we lift it up in glory; slack memory is advised to make a notch in it and it is wiped for you by your victor.” Therefore, putting the Freudian reading aside, we cannot ignore how more traditional Russian influences appear in the story. Even native English speakers know that the nose may express snobbery: we might “turn up our nose” at something we consider inferior.
One key idea in Russian literature, in keeping with the centrality of the Incarnation, is the importance of the face. A missing nose thus may represent a larger disorder of the soul. We do not need to look too far to see that Kovalyov is vain about his appearance, as the first thing he does upon waking is to call for his mirror “to examine the pimple which had sprung up on his nose the previous night . . .” And though Kovalyov did not serve in the military, he refers to himself by the military equivalent of his civilian rank: “to give himself greater weight and a sense of nobility he never called himself Collegiate Assessor, but always Major.” Kovalyov, the conceited man that he is, receives poetic justice in losing the organ which may be associated with his sin of excessive pride.
Connection to the Senses and Spiritual Insensitivity
In addition to connecting the nose with pride, we can appreciate the nose on a more basic level: it is the organ through which we perceive smell. But in Russian culture, the physical and spiritual are linked: in Scripture and throughout much of church history, the sense of smell has been a key part of worship. Gogol would devote attention to the role of smell in worship in one of his later works, Meditations on the Divine Liturgy (1851).
Commenting on the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is central to Orthodox worship, Gogol explains this about the preparation for reading the Gospel: “the deacon comes with the censer in his hand to fill the church with sweet fragrance for the reception of the Lord, reminding us by this censing of the spiritual purification of our souls with which we should attend to the fragrant words of the Gospel.” Throughout the liturgy and Gogol’s commentary, there are several similar reflections using olfactory imagery. Thus, in “The Nose,” Kovalyov’s loss of this particular organ illustrates how he is cut off from spiritual life.
“The Nose” as a Prophetic Dream to Heed
As the narrator marvels at the end of the story, the events described are implausible. Readers may not know how to make sense of the bizarre sequence of events, but here it helps to find critics who are sensitive to the nuances of the Russian language. As Ivan Yermakov points out in his psychoanalytic study of “The Nose,” the story’s title, “Nos” in Russian, is an inversion of the Russian word son, which means “dream.” Could the story be a dream? Certainly, the changes in the size of the nose—found in a roll and wrapped in paper in the beginning, but later walking around, wearing a uniform, and talking—suggest a dreamlike quality.
The possibility of a dream also makes sense when we consider the dates in the story. “The Nose” begins on March 25, when the barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, finds Kovalyov’s nose in his breakfast roll. The other date mentioned in the story, when Kovalyov finds his nose restored, is April 7. As Yermakov points out, before the Russian Revolution, Russia marked time with the Julian calendar, while Western Europe used the Gregorian calendar. In the 19th century, the calendars were 12 days apart. Juxtaposing the old and new calendars, March 25 and April 7 would be consecutive days, meaning the events of the story are an overnight dream.
Russian culture places prophetic significance on dreams; one key example is Tatyana’s dream in Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin. Prophetic dreams have precedent in the Christian Scriptures, from Jacob and Joseph in Genesis to the Wise Men and Joseph in the Gospel of Matthew. Therefore, if we dismiss “The Nose” because it is “just a dream,” we may miss the prophetic critique the story offers.
Connection to the Incarnation—and a Prophetic Critique
March 25 is also a significant date in the Christian calendar, Yermakov notes: it is the Feast of the Annunciation, where the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary that she would bear a son and call him Jesus. As an Orthodox Christian believer, Gogol recognized that the Incarnation of our Lord was an event that, like the events in “The Nose,” was difficult to comprehend—and yet the Incarnation stands at the heart of our Christian faith. And so, the narrator of the story concludes, reflecting on the strange events, “you must admit, when you think about it, there is something in all this, isn’t there? Whatever you might say, such things do happen—rarely perhaps, but they happen all the same.”
Readers may think it ridiculous, if not blasphemous, to connect this redemptive work of God, the Incarnation, to something as ridiculous as a vain man’s nose coming to life on its own. However, grappling with that seeming incongruity may deepen our understanding of Gogol’s prophetic critique.
One would suppose that Kovalyov should respond to his prophetic dream with repentance for his pride and his womanizing, rather than resuming his former way of life. Still, despite experiencing the extraordinary events described, Major Kovalyov himself does not change: “from then onwards Major Kovalyov continued about his business as if nothing had ever happened, promenading along Nevsky Prospect, visiting the theater, showing his face everywhere.” As Yermakov observes, “Something that could have brought about catharsis, awareness, purification, further growth and development, a turning point in life (an ‘annunciation’), has been lost beyond recall.” Jesse Zeldin further comments that Gogol “is attempting to accomplish a spiritual recognition of beauty, truth, and reality. By withholding this recognition from the people in his fictional works, he stressed its necessity to his readers.” The fact that Kovalyov returns to his usual habits, unmoved by his experience, may represent Gogol’s critique of insensitivity to spiritual matters that we all should respond to—even if Kovalyov remains blind.
One of my favorite recent reflections on “The Nose” comes from George Saunders, in his anthology and creative writing guide, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Saunders observes, “So, Kovalyov is a fool. But he’s also any one of us. There are some issues with a medical test. Could this be it? Our life suddenly seems precious, our habits stupid. Why do we golf so much? Why are we always on email, when our precious wife is sitting right there? The results come back: all is well. The mind relaxes into its previous torpor, and we’re happy again, and hop on email to see about booking a tee time, as our wife sits there watching.”
Saunders has a good point. How do we respond to warnings, whether in dreams, or more directly through Scripture, a pastor’s sermon, a counselor’s advice, or a friend’s rebuke? Do we consider them only for a moment and then return to our habitual distractions, or do we take these warnings seriously as opportunities to make changes? Therefore, while on the surface Gogol’s story might seem like an absurd comic romp, it offers applicable insights for us today.
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