Much has been made of the "
nose" theme in Nikolai Gogol''s (1809-1852) 1836 short story, "The Nose." Some critics, despite Vladimir Nabokov''s countering commentary, maintain that in Gogol''s topsy-turvy world, the nose represents a misplaced phallus, evidencing Gogol''s own uncertain sense of sexual identity. The story has essentially three parts. In the first part, St. Petersburg
barber Ivan Yakovlevich awakes to find a nose baked into his breakfast bread. He recognizes the nose as that of a recent customer, Major Platon Kovalyov, a collegiate assessor in the municipal government. The barber disposes of the nose by wrapping it in a cloth and throwing it into the water below the Isaac Bridge. In doing this he is observed by a
policeman. In the second part, Major Kovalyov awakens to look in the mirror and find that his nose is missing. He is most embarrassed about this and, covering his blank
face with a handkerchief, he walks out onto Nevsky Prospect to seek aid. There his discomfiture is increased when he encounters his nose exiting a
carriage. The nose is wearing the uniform of an official of higher
rank than his, and when Kovalyov politely asks the nose to
return to his face, the nose becomes indignant and denies that there could possibly be any connection between them. Kovalyov then unsuccessfully attempts to meet with the Chief of Police about his missing nose. He contemplates advertising in the newspaper for its return. But then the policeman who saw barber Ivan Yakovlevich throw the nose off the Isaac Bridge comes to Kovalyov''s house to inform him that the nose had been arrested just as it was getting into a carriage headed for Riga. The policeman returns the nose to Kovalyov in its cloth wrapping. Kovalyov is grateful, but does not know how he will reattach the nose to his face. In the third part, Kovalyov consults a physician to no avail. He concludes that the loss of his nose is the result of a spell put on him by the wife of his department superior, Madame Podtochina, who was angry at him, he thought, because he had refused to marry her daughter. He writes her a letter demanding that she restore his nose to its rightful place on his face or, he threatens, she will face legal procedures. He is awaiting an answer when, on April 7th, he awakens to find that his nose has inexplicably returned to his face.
The notion of a nose disappearing from a man''s face, taking on human size, government rank and uniform, is Gogol''s way of expressing life''s absurdity. As in several short stories that Gogol''s "The Nose" has influenced (e.g. Franz Kafka''s "The Metamorphosis"), the reader''s sense of expected reality is violated. Is this to be interpreted as the hallucinative perception of a madman? Or is it, perhaps, the narrator''s dream, evidenced by the fact that in Russian the word for nose is a word for dream or sleep spelled backwards (nos=son)? Gogol''s narrator comments at the end of the story to say that "Whatever you might say" about such strange events, "they do happen in our northern capital...rarely perhaps, but they happen." The story is the explanation for why Russian masquerade balls will frequently have someone come dressed as a nose.
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