“The world is suffused with perfect nonsense. Sometimes it is completely implausible.” So says the narrator of The Nose, which is, I think, the first thing I’ve read by Gogol. It’s been a while since I’ve read any of the Melville House “Art of the Novella” series – I used to get them at the library fairly often (their small size and good design always called out to me from the New Books shelf) and I was pleased to find, in these days where library service near me is still grab & go (hold pick-up only/no browsing), that my library has the ebook version of some of them. I like how the book presents the novella and then some other stuff—including, in this volume, other Gogol quotes about noses, some excerpts from Tristram Shandy, a letter from Gogol to his mother, and an excerpt from Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect.”
But back to The Nose. One morning Ivan Yakovlevich, a barber, gets up in the morning and slices into a loaf of bread his wife has just baked and finds “…a nose!” “Not only that, but a familiar nose” – the nose of one of his customers. Ivan Yakovlevich is distressed, and worried he’ll be charged with some crime; he wants to get rid of the nose ASAP but he isn’t sure how to manage it. After some difficulty, he manages to toss it into the river over the railing of a bridge.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in St. Petersburg, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov wakes up, looks at himself in the mirror, and finds that “where his nose should be was nothing but a perfectly flat patch of skin.” Kovalyov is dismayed: this is not going to be good for his job prospects, or for his chances with the ladies (with whom he very much likes to flirt). But wait, things get weirder: as Kovalyov is on his way to report his missing nose to the chief of police, he sees an “inconceivable sight” – his nose, somehow in the form of “a hunched gentleman in uniform,” getting out of a carriage. He follows it and confronts it: “it seems to me that you should know your place,”he says. But no: “The nose looked down his nose at the major, his brow furrowed.” “I am here on my own,” the nose eventually replies. Kovalyov is distracted by a pretty girl, and thinks he’ll flirt with her, but then remembers his condition; meanwhile, his nose leaves. We then follow Kovalyov as he considers further ways he might get his nose back (placing an ad in the newspaper? appealing to a police inspector?) and ponders how it might have gone away to begin with (a curse, placed on him by the mother of a lady he’s been flirting with but hasn’t proposed to?). But wait, things get worse: when Kovalyov is reunited with his nose, he can’t get it back on his face. Meanwhile, his nose becomes the talk of the town: there are endless rumors about where it takes its walks and spends its time, and everyone wants to catch a glimpse of it. And then, as suddenly as this whole thing started, it ends: Kovalyov wakes up one morning with his nose back where it belongs, after which he goes back to his usual life, “parading around town as though nothing had ever happened.”
I suspect I’d get the satire of this more if I knew more about Russia in the 1830s, but nevertheless this was a fun and funny read. It’s funny how Kovalyov is more worried about his chances with the ladies than anything else, and funny how the nose in uniform is able to pass itself off as a government official, higher in rank than Kovalyov. And Kovalyov’s interactions with a newspaper clerk, who refuses to place an ad in the paper about Kovalyov’s missing nose, are really great.
Further reading: this piece by Bob Blaisdell in the Los Angeles Review of Books makes me want to read more Gogol. I also like this post on the Melville House blog by Jonathan Gibbs, who doesn’t like this novella, and Ian Dreiblatt (the translator), who very much does.
Leave a Reply