Sniffing out stupidity and malevolence was the great gift of famed Ukrainian-born scribe, Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852). His most olfactive tale, appropriately enough, is called “The Nose,” a comically grotesque satire from 1836—grotesque in the sense of its storyline: a drunken barber finding a nose in his breakfast roll. (Think of it like the severed human ear we see close-up in the grass, crawling with ants, at the beginning of David Lynch’s film noir Blue Velvet.) In another Gogol story, “The Portrait,” haunted with its terrible eyes, Gogol’s own portrait has his nose take prominence. It becomes a nasal force, fleeing the frame to blow of its own volition. Remember, Gogol had a conk complex, a thing about noses, especially his own. “My nose,” he once told a lady friend, “is decidedly bird-like, pointed and long. However, in spite of its ridiculous appearance, it is a good beast: it has never been known to turn up, it has never sneezed to please my superiors or the authorities—in short, in spite of its excessive size, it has behaved itself with great moderation, for which, no doubt, it has got the reputation of a liberal.”
In 1828, as a naïve 19-year-old, humiliated by the reception of his self-published poem, “Hans Küchelgarten,” copies of which he tried to burn, Gogol set off to emigrate to the United States, getting as far as Lübeck, Germany, before giving up the ghost. Had he made it to the new world, he would have most certainly had a nose job; found some plastic surgeon to reshape it. “The Nose” even alludes to such a possibility: “I’ve heard there’s a certain kind of specialist,” somebody says, “who can fix you up with any kind of nose you like.” In a way, “The Nose” is Gogol’s nose job; he sticks it into the petty affairs of St. Petersburg officialdom, mocking its ranks, suggesting that it is not quite true that he never turned his nose up to anyone. After all, Gogol does something much worse: he has “Major” Kovalyov lose his. Gogol cuts off the conceited official’s nose in order to spite his face, wrenching him out of his snotty complacency. Gogol’s satire had always been biting; now it was so voracious that it bit off something completely.
Gogol was a natural born storyteller, even as a solitary writer. When he wrote, he’d lock himself away in his room and scribble standing up at a lectern. According to his friends—who would sometimes spy on the unsuspecting writer through the keyhole—before getting anything on paper, Gogol frantically paced up and down composing in his head, voicing aloud his characters’ dialogue, laughing to himself, engaging in all manner of bodily contortions, clutching his hair, pulling weird faces, and generally waving his arms about. Thus, the thespian element was embedded in his finished comic set-pieces, explaining why Gogol was such a brilliant reader of his own texts.
When it came to “Major” Kovalyov, the comedy was merciless, no holds barred. For one thing, Kovalyov is not a real major, just a collegiate assessor who calls himself “Major” out of vanity; as Gogol writes, “To make himself sound more important and give more weight and nobility to his status.” For another, this is no dream; that nose really does turn up one morning at the home of Ivan Yakovlevich, the wastrel barber, in the middle of his onion roll. The latter recognizes whose nose it is, having shaved Kovalyov a few days back, though he has no recollection of ever severing it with his razor.
Praskovya Osipovna, the barber’s wife, says that her husband can’t remember because he was dead drunk that day. In any case, she cries, “I’ve heard three customers say that when they come in for a shave you start tweaking their noses about so much it’s a wonder they stay on at all!” She goes on: “I’ve a mind to report you to the police myself.” The barber gets in a tizz about how to get rid of the snout, deciding to dump it in the Neva River, wrapped up in a handkerchief. But a policeman spots him on St. Isaac’s Bridge, up to something fishy, and hauls the barber in for loitering suspiciously. Thereafter, the nose appears across town, “wearing a gold-braided uniform with a high stand-up collar and chamois trousers.”
Meanwhile, waking up early, there was no mistake about it: Kovalyov’s nose had gone. “He began pinching himself to make sure he wasn’t sleeping, but to all intents and purposes he was wide awake.” “Damn it!” he screams. “What kind of trick is this?” It’s Gogol’s trick, of course, heaping scorn on parvenu narcissism, wreaking revenge, maybe, on all those who mocked his own elongated beak when he was a lad, imagining them, like Kovalyov, losing theirs. Noseless, Kovalyov can no longer pursue his sleazy habit of chatting up pretty young girls. Nor can he wine and dine with his old cronies, or swagger proudly along the Nevsky Prospect, or boss about his inferiors at the office, pulling rank just for the hell of it. Now, “instead of a fairly presentable and reasonably sized nose,” all Kovalyov has is “an absolutely preposterous smooth flat space.”
By chance, one afternoon, he spots his nose stepping out of a carriage. “It had a sword at its side,” says Gogol. “From the plumes on its hat one could tell that it held the exalted rank of state counselor.” Kovalyov nearly goes out of his mind and runs after the carriage, which comes to halt outside Kazan Cathedral. Once inside, Kovalyov confronts the nose. “What do you want?” the nose replies, curtly. “My dear sir,” Kovalyov says in a smug voice, “my dear sir…. Don’t you realize, you are my own nose!” The nose has none of it, looks down on Kovalyov the way the collegiate assessor looked down on people when this nose was firmly affixed to his own face. He gets a touch of his own medicine, having his nose turn itself up at him.
Then the nose slips away unseen, disappearing into the crowd. Infuriated, Kovalyov heads straight to police headquarters to report a scoundrel on the loose. But the authorities are as indolent on the job as Kovalyov is on his; the commissioner isn’t around, and nobody at the station gives a toss about a stray nose. In the evening, he tries the local inspector of police, who “gave Kovalyov a rather cold welcome and said that after dinner wasn’t at all the time to start investigations,” and “that respectable men do not get their noses ripped off, and that there were no end of majors knocking around who were not too fussy about their underwear and who were in the habit of visiting the most disreputable places.” Gogol notes: “These home truths stung Kovalyov to the quick.”
Kovalyov decides to put an ad in a Petersburg rag about a missing body part, hoping somebody might hand it in. The newspaper clerk, nonplussed, says such an announcement would give the paper a bad reputation, possibly ending up as a libel case, like the one they had the other week with a lost poodle. “My God!” despairs Kovalyov. “What have I done to deserve this?” Before long, the nose is seen taking strolls along the Nevsky Prospect, at exactly three o’clock every afternoon. Crowds of inquisitive people flock there to watch the spectacle.
After a few days, though, the police seize it and bring it to Kovalyov. He is thrilled, yet perplexed about how to stick his nose back on. The doctor is as clueless as anybody and suggests putting it in a jar of alcohol; “better still, soak it in two tablespoons of sour vodka and warmed-up vinegar, and you’ll get good money for it. I’ll take it myself if you don’t want it.” In the end, the nose miraculously shows up again, in its rightful place on the collegiate assessor’s face, between his two cheeks, and Kovalyov wonders if the whole ordeal had been a bad dream. “He grabbed it with his hand to make sure—but there was no doubt this time. Aha!”
“The Nose” is a decidedly weird tale, even by Gogol’s decidedly weird standards. His letters suggest he had initially conceived the story as a dream, but then decided to present it in waking Petersburg life. Still, with Gogol, it is not so straightforward; nothing ever is. After all, his narrator tells us that Kovalyov was “to all intents and purposes wide awake.” It is the “to all intents and purposes” that raises doubts. “Perhaps I dreamt it!” Kovalyov wonders, planting further seeds of ambiguity. “How could I be so stupid as to go and lose my nose?” Was it, then, something he did himself? Or was it the barber? But how could the barber do it and Kovalyov not know it? Whatever the case, it isn’t realism we are dealing with here. It’s Gogol’s experiment in surrealist black humor, a dark syllabus that anticipates Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, playfully pulling the rug from underneath readers—or pulling the wool from over our eyes—provoking us, taunting us, especially with its disclaimer: “The world is full of the most outrageous nonsense. Sometimes things happen which you would hardly think possible.”
His final paragraph has the reader wondering if this was something of Gogol’s springtime sniffing, his April Fool’s gag all along (remember, the author was born on April 1): “All of this took place in the northern capital of our vast empire! Only now, after much reflection, can we see that there is a great deal that is very far-fetched in this story. Apart from the fact that it’s highly unlikely for a nose to disappear in such a fantastic way and then reappear in various parts of town dressed as a state counselor, it is hard to believe that Kovalyov was so ignorant to think newspapers would accept advertisements about noses.” However, says Gogol, you will find much in life that is not on the absurd side somewhere. “Whatever you may say, these things do happen in this world—rarely, I admit, but they do happen.”
Almost two centuries after its publication, Gogol’s “Nose” still pokes fun at authorities and class power everywhere. He mobilizes absurdity to pillory the negative, to voice the artist as critic; yet with absurdity he also defends the “little people,” those victims of petty power who feel its injustice and complacency, and who feel it while they experience their own sense of powerlessness. But Gogol is no bleeding-heart liberal. His moral stances are frequently difficult to pin down, never fully settled upon. Sometimes the wielders of petty power are precisely his little people. In their fawning servility, in their yearning to rise up the slippery slope of officialdom, in their blatant stupidity, in their desire to believe lies, Gogol knocks them down.
Vladimir Nabokov, in his brilliant little study Nikolai Gogol, says Gogol’s nose isn’t a proxy for sexual organs, nor any castration fantasy, which is probably how Sigmund Freud might have read it. Rather, nasal symbolism for Gogol is more a narrative device, not so much a tongue-puller as a nose-twister, a piece of mischievous trickery related to the nose-humor so ubiquitous in Russian carnival tradition and in the hundreds of Russian sayings that revolve around the nose. Gogol knew them well. Nosology and nose-consciousness was rife in his day, all of which doubtless drew attention to the fact that his own beak was exaggeratedly long.
“The man with the longest nose,” a Russian proverb goes, “sees further.” Gogol did not just see further, but, as Nabokov says, brought new odors to literature and life. That’s doubtless why the authorities objected to his olfactivism: it was sniffing out awful truths about society, scenting other possibilities. When Gogol first penned “The Nose,” publishers weren’t turned on. They passed up on taking the tale, dismissing it as “sordid.” In printing it, they feared prosecution. It always perplexed Gogol. Was this not the function of art? “Art can never be immoral,” he says. “It necessarily aspires to the good, whether by positive or negative means: it shows us the beauty of whatever is best in man or ridicules the worst. If you expose all the filth in man so that people experience total revulsion—well, I ask you, isn’t that in itself praise of the good?”
Gogol’s friend Alexander Pushkin eventually took the story for his own journal, The Contemporary, yet warned Gogol of probable trouble ahead, of censor repercussions. When Gogol first read his story out in public at a St. Petersburg literary soirée, Prince Peter Vyazemsky, a sometime poet and one of Pushkin’s best friends, described it as “killingly funny.” But the censor’s beef was that the nose chose to cavort in Kazan Cathedral, a holy institution. As such, the setting was offensive, blasphemous, and had to be axed. In later versions, Gogol changed Kovalyov’s encounter with his nose to a shopping arcade—though modern reprints have restored Kazan Cathedral.
By the time of its third printing, in 1854, two years after Gogol’s death, the story went under the censor’s nose again. “The aim of the author,” they claimed, “is obscure and capable of being interpreted in various ways.” This time they had gotten Gogol right. In condemning the tale accordingly, censors provided no better testimony to Gogol’s genius, that he was the creator of dangerous literature, a literature so ambiguous that it gave people all sorts of ideas, maybe ideas above their station, maybe that they never want to go to that station. Readers might thereafter follow their own noses, and threaten the status quo, challenge the authorities as Gogol had challenged us to challenge them. Gogol’s literature stimulates deep feelings in a variety of ways, in unforeseen ways, in ways beyond the grip and grasp of governments.
That is as good a reason as any why we should continue to read him, why we should continue to laugh with him, and why today’s censors will continue to concern themselves about any dangerous literature. Intelligent people these days need his laugh more than ever, if only to save us from crying. “When I heard that entire groups and classes of society were taking offense and were even angry at me,” Gogol said, “it amazed me to such a degree that I finally began to reflect: If the power of laughter is so great as to be feared, then one ought not waste it purposelessly. If it’s necessary to laugh, then why not laugh at what deserves to be ridiculed?”
Most of us know from Pinocchio what happens to kids who tell fibs. Big fibs meant big noses; nice boys who fibbed and said sorry had the woodpecker come to peck their noses back to normal size. But that’s a children’s fairytale. In an adult parable, fib-tellers should lose their noses entirely; instead, they assume political power and get mass adulation. The woodpecker should refuse to help them, and “an absolutely preposterous smooth flat space” would prevail on their faces as a badge of dishonor. Then corridors of political and economic power would be crawling with noseless Kovalyovs, as would many commercial TV and radio studios, from the petty fibbers to the really big liars, like those who say they’re going to make America great again. Gogol would have it in for the purveyors of such porkies, and for the stupidity of believers. He would help rewrite the script of our times and give us florid descriptions of noseless villains clambering around frantically, outed as malicious lie-tellers, there for every honest person to see. What a day! Fake news’ nose snubbed! Whatever you may say, these things do happen in this world—rarely, I admit, but they do happen. Don’t they?
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