"The Nose”: A Stylistic and Critical Companion to Nikolai Gogol’s Story

“The Nose” 
A Stylistic and Critical 
Companion to 
Nikolai Gogol’s Story

Companions to Russian Literature
Series Editor
Thomas Seifrid (University of Southern California, Los Angeles)

B O S T O N
2 0 2 1
K S A N A B L A N K
“The Nose” 
A Stylistic and Critical 
Companion to 
Nikolai Gogol’s Story

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blank, Ksana, author. | 880-01 Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich,  
1809-1852. Nos.
Title: “The Nose”: a stylistic and critical companion to Nikolai Gogol’s     story / 
Ksana Blank.
Other titles: Companions to Russian literature.
Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Series: Companions  
to Russian literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020049545 (print) | LCCN 2020049546 (ebook) |  
9781644695197 (hardback) | 9781644695203 (paperback) | 
9781644695210 (adobe PDF) | 9781644695227 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich, 1809-1852. Nos. | Gogolʹ,  
Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich, 1809-1852—Language. | Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich, 
1809-1852—Aesthetics.  
Classification: LCC PG3332.N63 B53 2021  (print) | LCC PG3332.N63  (ebook)  
| DDC 891.73/3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049545 
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049546
Copyright © 2021, Academic Studies Press 
All rights reserved.  
Illustrations to Gogol’s “The Nose” by Julia Belomlinsky, 2018. 
Reproduced by the author’s permission.  
Cover design by Ivan Grave 
Cover illustration by Julia Belomlinsky 
Book design by Tatiana Vernikov  
Published by Academic Studies Press  
1577 Beacon Street 
Brookline, MA 02446, USA  
press@academicstudiespress.com  
www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents
Note on Translation and Transliteration	
6
Introduction	 	
7
Part One. How “The Nose” Is Made
Н. В. Гоголь «Нос» 	
13
Annotations to the Russian Text	
49
  I	
	
51
 II	
	
63
III	
	
82
Language Game as the Engine of the Plot 	
85
Part Two. Interpretations
1. Joke, Farce, Anecdote	
112
2. Social Satire	
125
3. Mockery of the Demonic and of the Sacred	
133
4. Chronicle of Folk Superstitions 	
149
5. A Case of Castration Anxiety	
161
6. An Echo of German Romanticism	
168
7. Perfect Nonsense 	
179
8. Shostakovich’s Opera The Nose 	
191
9. A Play with Reality: “The Nose,” Kafka, and Dalí 	
207
Instead of a Conclusion	
219
Selected Bibliography	
220
Index	
	
232
Acknowledgements	
236

Note on Translation and Transliteration
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Russian are 
mine. Russian names in the text are spelled in the form most familiar 
to English readers. For all other Russian words I have followed the 
Library of Congress transliteration system.  

Introduction
A great number of books and scholarly articles have been devoted 
to Gogol’s artistic language, but just a few of them are dedicated 
specifically to the language and style of Gogol’s “The Nose”—the 
story about a collegiate assessor, Platon Kuzmich Kovalеv, who 
awakes on the morning of March 25 to discover that his nose is 
missing.1 The reason for this absence may very well be the story’s 
uniqueness, as “The Nose” differs significantly from all other 
works by Gogol. Unlike many of them, it does not contain archaic 
bookish vocabulary or metaphors of early romanticism. In contrast 
with Gogol’s Ukrainian short stories and his novel Dead Souls, 
there are very few litotes and hyperboles in the work, and it has no 
lyrical digressions. “The Nose” also differs from the stories of his 
Petersburg cycle. 
For example, unlike “The Overcoat,” with its protagonist’s 
famous emotional complaint “Why do you insult me?,” “The 
Nose” does not contain sentimental passages. In comparison with 
1	
The most notable studies on Gogol’s artistic language and style include 
I. E. Mandel′shtam, O kharaktere gogolevskogo stilia: Glava iz istorii russkogo 
literaturnogo iazyka (Gel′singfors: Novaia tip. Guvudstadsbladet, 1902). 
See also works by Viktor Vinogradov, such as Gogol′ i natural′naia shkola 
(Leningrad: Obrazovanie, 1925) (English edition: V. V. Vinogradov, Gogol and 
the Natural School, trans. Debra K. Erickson and Ray Parrott, introd. by Debra 
K. Erikson [Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1987]); “Еtiudy o stile Gogolia,” in Poetika 
russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 228–66; K istorii 
leksiki russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, ed. L. V. Shcherba (Leningrad: Academia, 
1927), Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka ХVII–XIX vv. (Moscow: 
Gos. uchebno-ped. izd-vo, 1934); “Iazyk Gogolia i ego znachenie v istorii 
russkogo iazyka,” in Iazyk i stil′ russkikh pisatelei: Ot Gogolia do Akhmatovoi; 
Izbrannye trudy, ed. A. P. Chudakov (Moscow: Nauka, 2003), 54–96. Another 
important work is Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia: Issledovanie, foreword 
by L. Kamenev (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi 
literatury, 1934) (English edition: Andrei Bely, Gogol’s Artistry, trans. and 
introd. by Christopher Colbath, foreword by Vyacheslav Ivanov [Evanston, 
IL.: Northwestern University Press, 2009]).

Introduction
8
“The Notes of a Madman,” it has fewer expressions derived from 
bureaucratic jargon. In contrast with “Nevsky Prospect” and its 
famous claim about the city’s main artery—“It lies all the time, this 
Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves is 
dense mass upon it . . .  when the whole city turns into a rumbling 
and brilliance, myriads of carriages tumble from the bridges . . .  and 
the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not 
as it really looks”—there are no exaggerations in the description 
of the city in “The Nose.”2 In other words, the question of what 
constitutes the specific stylistic and lexical features of this story is 
still open. 
In the annotations to the Russian text in the first part of this 
book, I intend to demonstrate that the originality of the story owes 
a great deal to Gogol’s wordplay on idiomatic expressions, which are 
abundant in the work, specifically to the technique of “literalizing” 
Russian idioms. To be sure, the prime example of such literalization 
is Gogol’s play with the idiom остаться с носом (“to be fooled”; lit. 
“to be left with a nose”); this idiom has been noted in Gogol studies 
on many occasions. In its inverted form it serves as the engine of the 
plot: the story of how Major Kovalev was left without his nose. The 
annotations demonstrate that there are dozens of other examples in 
Gogol challenging the stability of lexical components in set phrases. 
This device is used for a variety of purposes: to create a comical 
effect, a biting satire of Russian society, an ironic mode, and a sense 
of absurdity. 
These twisted and turned idioms often remain unnoticeable 
to English readers. Walter Redfern, a renowned scholar of French 
literature, rightfully observes, “Idioms are the hardest part of 
a language for a foreigner to use or understand appositely. As their 
root suggests they are the most autarkic area of speech and writing. 
The segments that make them up frequently create something 
different as a totality.”3 
2	
Nikolai Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect,” in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. 
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 278.
3	
Walter Redfern, Clichés and Coinages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 126.

Introduction
9
The purpose of my annotations is to facilitate the reading of this 
little masterpiece. The annotations also focus on confusing stylistic 
details, oddly formed sentences, as well as many other obscure 
remarks the narrator makes in his witty banter with the reader. 
Gogol’s descriptions of everyday life in St. Petersburg would have 
been familiar to his contemporaries and fellow citizens but are hidden 
from the modern reader, therefore they require commentaries as 
well. To make the use of annotations more convenient, the book 
opens with the Russian text of the story.4 
In the section titled “How ‘The Nose’ is Made: Language Game 
as the Engine of the Plot,” I state that the main protagonist of the 
story is the Russian language. There I also formulate the role and 
functions of Gogol’s narrative manner and point out that Gogol’s 
play on idiomatic expressions in “The Nose” creates a form of 
skaz—a type of narrative recounted by a person whose manner of 
speech is different from the style of the author. In other words, the 
development of the plot in “The Nose” is propelled by the narrator’s 
masterful language game with the reader.  
The  second part of the book is devoted to the story’s 
interpretations. In 1859, the literary critic Apollon Grigoryev, who 
referred to his own style of criticism as “organic” (in contrast with the 
socially oriented critics Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, 
and Nikolai Dobrolyubov), commented on “The Nose” with a subtle 
4	
There are three editions of “The Nose”—the 1835 version sent to the 
Moscow Observer; the 1836 version published in Pushkin’s The Contemporary 
(Sovremennik), and the 1842 version as part of Gogol’s first collected works. 
Because of his censors’ criticism, Gogol was forced to alter some details in 
the second and third versions. The second one is more concise than the first 
and has a different ending. The scene in Kazan Cathedral was criticized 
by censors, so Gogol replaced Kazan Cathedral with Gostiny Dvor (a vast 
department store in Saint Petersburg). Gogol also removed the suggestion 
that the “incredible incident” happened in the dream and added an ironic 
afterword, a parody of a review in the conservative newspaper The Northern 
Bee. In the third version, Gogol again revised and expanded the ending of 
the story, turning it into a third chapter. See N. L. Stepanov’s commentary in 
N. Gogol′, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo AN SSSR, 
1937–1952), vol. 3, ed. N. L. Meshcheriakov, 649–60. The third version is now 
considered canonical.

Introduction
10
warning against excessive interpretations of this story: “The most 
original and bizarre work, where everything is fantastic and at the 
same time everything is extremely poetic truth, where everything 
is clear without an explanation and where any explanation would 
kill poetry.”5 The next four decades were a period of silence, but 
at the turn of the twentieth century Gogol’s work, including “The 
Nose,” became the focus of attention for many Russian writers and 
critics, who approached it from different perspectives. In his essay 
“Gogol” (1909), Andrey Bely wrote, “I don’t know who Gogol is: 
a realist, symbolist, romantic or classicist . . . . Gogol is a genius 
whom you cannot approach at all with a scholastic definition. I have 
a penchant for symbolism; consequently, it is easier for me to see 
the features of Gogol’s symbolism; a romantic will see a romantic in 
him; a realist will see a realist.”6 
As short as it is, the story inspired scholars belonging to different 
branches of literary studies to search for very different motivations 
for the disappearance of the nose from Major Kovalev’s face, and 
to view the story from sociological, formalist, psychoanalytic, 
folk, religious, intertextual, mythological, and philosophical 
perspectives. Scholars have debated the meaning of the story, some 
of them claiming that it has none. Funny, fantastic, and original, in 
the course of the past 185 years, “The Nose” has been approached 
from a great variety of perspectives; it was viewed as a mere joke 
and as a satire of Russian society; as Gogol’s mystical insight and 
as an expression of his anticlerical feelings; as a case of castration 
anxiety and as pure nonsense.  
The second part provides an overview of a broad spectrum of 
such perspectives and of a wide range of interpretations, which 
are often oppositional and contrasting, but not mutually exclusive. 
Despite Apollon Grigoryev’s warning, the interpretations given by 
Gogol’s first critics, the ideas voiced by the scholars in the twentieth 
5	
Apollon Grigor′ev, Literaturnaia kritika (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia 
literatura, 1967), 194.
6	
Andreiy Belyi, “Gogol′,” in Gogol′ v russkoi kritike: Antologiia, ed. S. G. Bocharov 
(Moscow: Fortuna, 2008), 268–69.