Status in Imperial Russia, Gogol then takes us and Kovalev out onto the street, After noticing a small spot on his nose the nightīefore, he now discovers the whole thing is missing. Next we wake up with the man with the missing nose,Ĭollegiate Assessor Kovalev.
At this point the narrator intervenes to say: “But at this moment the whole matter was completely covered in fog, and I have absolutely no idea what happened next”. Threatened with the police by his wife, Ivan runs outside and throws the nose in the river, only to be caught anyway by a passing policeman. The nose belongs to a civil servant, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, whose whiskers Ivan Yakovlevich trims a few times each week. (In much the same way, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” begins with a strangeĮvent, but the true strangeness comes in the reactions of Gregor Samsa’s Logic of Gogol’s world, where a man can recognise the nose of another with suchĬertainty. What it was! And what was more, it seemed to belong to someone he knew…”Īlready the initial strangeness of finding the nose is compounded by the absurd Of the loaf of bread he has just cut there is a nose. However, to his great surprise, he finds that in the middle One morning the barber Ivan Yakovlevich wakes up and has hisīreakfast as usual. The Story of “The Nose” Part I: Ivan Yakovlevich Translations from the Russian are all my own. Though it’s a story about a nose, “The Nose” has a lot of depth and flavour to it.
The spark of genius is not a good metaphor here – rather the spark is the strange idea, and Gogol’s talent is all the wood he is able to gather together for the fire.
The challenge, and the sheer genius of Gogol, lies in taking a strange and simple idea and extending it, through understanding it and its implications fully, into a full story. Anybody can come up with a strange idea – that’s ultimately not hard that hard if you’re sleep deprived or have access to drugs – and even writing about such an idea doesn’t take too much doing. The completely surreal idea of losing one’s nose reminds me a little bit of the sort of modern art that we foolishly claim our children could have painted. Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), writer of strange tales of Saint Petersburg, and himself a bearer of a fantastic nose!
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