Today my father was cremated. Though he had lived an enviable life he was just fifty-nine – not an age at which many would be satisfied to face death. For my brother and me, at sixteen and twenty-one, it feels far too soon to lose him, and more than a little unfair. But so sudden was the cancer that we all had little say in the matter. Death affects us all in different ways, and those of us touched by it must find our own solutions for coping, whether they be fighting bravely against the current, or following it into a numbing despair that seems, all things considered, reasonable enough. I want here to set down a few thoughts about books, and their value, in times of difficulty. Exhaustion has left my mind not entirely clear, so I apologise for mistakes and incoherency. This is, I’m afraid, a personal piece.
Medicine
I am the only one in my family who reads fiction. My father was a great lover of non-fiction and read widely, according to his whimsy, in the way that only one who is naturally intelligent but has never been confined in a university can. When news of his several brain tumours came, just over two months ago, in spite of his inability to read properly he did what he could to try and understand the disease that was killing him, and see if he might not discover a solution that the doctors had passed over or did not know. I myself placed my faith in them, because I know many medics at Cambridge, and they have always struck me as the greatest, hardest working, and best of all the students there. If anybody could save him, it seemed to me that a doctor would be the one.
Leo Tolstoy may have ended up with some odd views about God and religion, but at his best his fiction can instil a sense of wonder that lets us weather the storm the death brings into our lives
In Anna Karenina Tolstoy on several occasions displays
a sort of scorn towards medicine. Doctors come to try to rescue Kitty from her
despair, proscribing contradictory remedies that never work and looking like
fools in the process. Of course, Tolstoy has a point that is still relevant
today, when it has been proven how much our mental health can affect our
physical health. Often the best remedies can be ones of the heart and head, and
not things we ingest. Tolstoy’s mistake, at least as I see it, is that he
thinks all diseases work this way and doctors have no purpose. But he was as
opinionated as they come, and I can understand why he thought that way – at least
in the late 19th century medicine still had something alchemical to
it. Now we are much luckier. My father’s problems were in his head, yes, but not
his mind.
Wonder
I thought of Tolstoy a lot as my father rapidly declined. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Hadji Murat, and Anna Karenina in particular were sources of comfort. They made death real, but Tolstoy, the spiritual man, also made death valuable and sacred by imbuing it with a sense of wonder and mystery. He makes us see its horror, yes, but he also shows that through it there may also come a kind of salvation. There was a sense of wonder in seeing my father’s casket, and a sense of wonder in hearing our bagpiper piping us all in. In moments of such wonder you can feel that death is but a stepping-stone to something that lies beyond.
Tolstoy, like the best of our writers and artists, instils this sense of wonder. They make us see that death is not an end, but a new beginning. By making us aware of the mystical, the spiritual component that accompanies a passing on, they give us the consolation that mere thoughts and intellectual rigor cannot. Schopenhauer’s idea of death as returning to sleep is nice, but not nearly so nice as what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other writers of spiritual conviction can achieve at their best. The Bible, and the other mystical books of our world’s religions, are full of tales that inspire wonder. They give us food for belief in magic, the sort of magic that makes the world glisten and shine with meaning. I’m thinking of Ivan Karamazov’s sticky buds here. And when we feel wonder, nothing, not even death, can hurt us or our love for the world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky is another writer who for me can fight against the pain of death. His earnest belief in God and mankind, regardless of one’s own spiritual persuasions, is inspiring. His politics, however, is not.
Dreams and Levin’s Brother
For what consolation can rationalism offer here? The man under the shroud is still dead and cold. Death can lose its sting through thinking about the absence of our perceptions in the tomb, but loss of life will never cease to be painful to contemplate unless we see the mystical opportunities that surround it. My father came to me in a dream. He was in the Saint Petersburg Metro, healthy and well again, and heading onwards. He did not speak, but we embraced. The dream came during his final night alive – he died the next afternoon. Of course, it could have been just luck that made him appear at that time. But I see no reason to favour seeing it as mere chance instead of a holy and hopeful sign.
I cannot explain my dream, except as a revelation of the magic and mystery of our human souls. I remember clearly the death of Levin’s brother in Anna Karenina – his death was not one, but twofold. He said his final words and departed in dignity as a soul – “Don’t leave me”. And then he struggled on for another day, and when the characters gathered round his deathbed mention he has finished his struggling he suddenly comes back to life to say: “Not yet… just a little longer”. And then he dies as a body as well.
Conclusion: Narratives against Death
I have an advantage as a reader and as a writer. I live in stories, and I build them. Death, as Walter Benjamin remarks, destroys the placidity of our bourgeois existence – it is the one thing that breaks through even the strongest of our illusions and delusions about our lives. It creates a rupture and destroys the meaning of our world. In the initial weeks of my father’s illness I was almost glad to have, for the first time, a real reason to be depressed. It felt right for once to be in mental anguish. But of all my family I have been the one to cope with the fewest tears and the least pain, and I can’t help but think that reading has something to do with that.
Against the rupture of death, I was able to create a narrative, to come to an understanding with what has happened. I had read about death many times, and when the grief came, I saw how it reflected countless moods I’d seen in books. It gave me the community of fellow-sufferers and their strengths, and their own attempts to move on. And it made me feel less alone. By understanding that stories are the way we give meaning to our lives, I was able to reconfigure the meaning of my own to take into account my father’s death. Perhaps I am deluding myself in talking of wonder, in seeing signs in dreams and the dewy grass. But it is the power of books that they give you the choice to do so. They give you the tools to choose your fate. And that is a magical thing, whatever you believe.
Have you found literature to be a consolation in times of great suffering? Or have all our great scribblings become petty and unreal for you under the harsh light of death? Do leave a comment and let me know what you think
I’ve written earlier here about Gogol’s “The Nose”. But Gogol wrote more tales about Saint Petersburg than just that one and the equally well-known “The Overcoat”. He wrote five Petersburg Tales in all, and today I’ll give my impressions on both “Nevsky Prospekt” and “Notes of a Madman”, which are good, but not nearly as good as those other two tales. Since I’ve now been living in the city again for a month already, they make for interesting reading. As for the story “The Portrait”, which I liked a lot, I’ll save it for another time.
Nevsky Prospekt
In Saint Petersburg, in spite of the best efforts of the
Bolsheviks to replace it with Moskovsky Prospekt (Moscow Avenue) in the south,
the most important street in the city is still Nevsky Prospekt. At its far end
there lies the golden spire of the Admiralty Building, and halfway down there
is the Cathedral of our Lady of Kazan, one of the most beautiful cathedrals in
the whole city. As for the other buildings, just as was the case in Gogol’s
time there are a lot of shops, though now they are much more touristy than once
they were. Though you can buy yourself some upmarket things here too, such as
caviar, if you’re concerned at all about saving money you would be better off
looking elsewhere. During the day in the summer it’s packed with tourists, and during
the evening they are joined by local musicians, strutting their stuff.
Nevsky Prospekt as it would have been shortly before Gogol was writing his Petersburg Tales
It is this place, half magical, half grimy and commercial, that forms the theme of Gogol’s Petersburg Tale: “Nevsky Prospekt”. Rather boringly he describes life on the avenue for about ten pages, from dawn till the narrator gets tired and distracted (half way through the afternoon). There is a lot that is interesting if you happen to like this sort of stuff, but I’m not sure there are that many that do. There is irony in abundance, and lots for me to take apart when I inevitably have to write an essay on the Petersburg Tales, but that doesn’t make for great reading.
Eventually, we meet our two heroes – for this is not one story, but two, taking place on the same city’s street. The first is Piskarev, while the second is Pirogov – one of those characters with a classical Gogolian name. “Mr Pie”, I suppose, would convey the idea in English.
Piskarev’s story – the first of the beautiful women
Piskarev’s story centres around a woman, seen by him as he’s walking down Nevsky Prospekt. This woman, as is frustratingly common in the Petersburg Tales and Russian literature of this period more broadly, is mind-blowingly beautiful. I say this because Gogol seems to forget that women have personalities, and their beauty seems to be his excuse to avoid coming up with one. Though, perhaps I shouldn’t complain too much, since in actual fact this story plays with this idea anyway.
Anyway, Piskarev is an artist, and he decides to follow this woman home – as one does in early 19th century Russia. As he chases after her he continually imagines that she gives him signs of encouragement, from “an easy smile” to a beckoning gesture with her finger. At this point I was sure Gogol was simply demonstrating the degree to which Piskarev was deluding himself in his attempted pursuit of the woman, but in actually all of these signs are happening in the real world, and not just in his head, though we don’t yet know it. Piskarev heads up to the fourth floor, which in Gogol’s world always hints at the devil (the Russian word for “devil” and for “four” are almost the same), where he finds a trio of women, including the one he followed. I thought it was a parallel to the Fates of Greek Mythology.
And all the while Piskarev heaps on his adoration for the girl – “God, what godly features!”. But he is betrayed, for this woman is no goddess: she is just a prostitute, even though her beauty is mindblowing. The destruction of Piskarev’s delusions are too much to bear, especially when the woman starts speaking “such stupid things, such base things” – and he flees. That night he dreams that she is not a prostitute at all, and that she was merely testing him, and now is inviting him to a ball. He goes, speaks with her again, and finds her to be closer to what he wants. But then he awakes, and the dream is gone.
In search of the dream girl
Piskarev cannot let things stand like that, especially when his dream was so wonderful compared to the reality he’d encountered. He attempts to go to sleep again, and sleeps as much as he can, all to try to recover that dream, so that “eventually the dreams became his life”. He stops going out, lives only to fall asleep. But the dream fades and fades, and he is forced to resort to opium to return its contents to him. With this preference for the dream over reality comes a theme that runs throughout the Petersburg Tales – that of the sanctity of life. Because in his preference for the dream, Piskarev comes to believe “It was better that she had never existed! That she’d not lived in the world, but was just the creation of an inspired artist’s mind!” – he comes to reject life itself.
Eventually he decides to go back to the woman, to try to save her from her situation. But she doesn’t want to be saved – she appears to be happy. “I only just woke up – they brought me back at seven in the morning. I was completely pissed!”. Piskarev’s artistic imaginings mean he cannot bear the thought that beauty of body doesn’t always correspond to what we assume beauty of mind is. Piskarev doesn’t value her – he only sees her as an artistic object. Dejected and humiliated by her refusal to come with him, Piskarev kills himself. For not valuing her life his punishment is to cease to value his own.
Pirogov’s Story – yet another beauty
Pirogov’s tale concerns another attempted seduction – this time of the wife of a German craftsman – and is as packed with delusion as Piskarev’s story was. Schiller is the name of the German, a drunk but talented worker whose wife has the misfortune of being seen by Pirogov as he was walking down Nevsky Prospekt. Pirogov decides to use all his powers to spend time with her, including paying an extortionate sum to Schiller for the pleasure of a new set of curtains, which gives him plenty of opportunities to drop by and check on their progress. The delusions here concern Pirogov’s view of himself: “politeness and his magnificent rank absolutely gave him the right to full attention”. What this means in practice is that he assumes he can get whatever he wants because he is a civil servant and Schiller is not.
In this manner kisses with Schillers wife, inappropriate
touches, and so on and so forth take place, all while Pirogov justifies the
whole thing to himself as being completely in accordance with public etiquette.
The situation is funny, but horrific at the same time. The wife, whose Russian
is almost non-existent, is a completely passive victim in the text. The high
point of the story I shall quote in full because it is particularly comic.
Pirogov has determined when Schiller will not be home so that he can finally
have some time alone with his wife. He enters, finds her alone, and decides to
ask her if she’d like to dance.
“The German agreed at once, for Germans are always lovers of
dance. On this front Pirogov had placed a lot of his hopes: firstly, it already
gave her pleasure; secondly, it could show his own talents and gracefulness;
thirdly, while dancing you can get very close, embrace the cute little German
and start the whole thing off – in short, he concluded he would have complete
success here. He started some kind of gavotte, knowing that Germans need gradual
seduction. The cute little German stepped into the centre of the room and
raised one beautiful little leg. This situation so overjoyed Pirogov that he
lost all control and began to kiss her. The German began to cry out, which in
fact just increased her wonderfulness in the eyes of Pirogov, and he covered
her in even more kisses. But just at that moment the door opened, and Schiller
and Hoffmann and the joiner Kuntz entered. All of these worthy craftsmen were
drunk as old boots.
And I will leave it to the reader to imagine the displeasure
and wrath of Schiller.”
Pirogov’s story concludes exactly as might be predicted. He gets beaten up, goes home, but unlike Piskarev he finds solace in reading, and eventually moves on.
Nevsky Prospekt – Conclusion
What is Nevsky Prospekt? Gogol’s goal in this story appears to be to show that the place is more than a road. It is something magical, with more than a hint of the demonic about it too. But that magic manifests itself in tired tropes of overly seductive women with no personalities, which doesn’t, in this day and age, make for particularly interesting reading. There are exciting, thought-provoking things going on here: there is the way that a place like Nevsky Prospekt can contain within itself a huge number of potential associations and powers; there is also in Piskarev’s story an entertaining reversal of his unfounded hopes for the beautiful woman’s beautiful mind. And most importantly, these stories are funny. But ultimately, since I go down the street almost every day now, I can’t help but feel a sense of missed opportunity. There is so much more here than girls.
I do like the title though. It puts location in pride of place as opposed to the other Petersburg Tales where objects seem to be the main receptacles for magic and the demonic.
The hero of “Notes of a Madman”, as imagined by Ilya Repin, the Russian painter
Notes of a Madman
This one is strange. In fact, though it’s the funniest of the Petersburg Tales it’s probably also the most uninteresting of the them – the impression I got while reading it was that it could have been written by anybody with sufficient talents, not just Gogol. There was something missing, or rather, there was too much there. Too much strangeness is always the danger in these kinds of stories and in this one Gogol sort of overdoes it. His narrator goes from being odd to being completely mad. At the time of its writing this story may well have seemed pretty novel, but by now it feels somewhat like a collection of tropes. For example, the use of the diary format. At first everything is organised “October 3rd…,” then the next entry, etc, but by the end it collapses into gibberish – “Marchtober 86th, between day and night”.
The story follows another down-and-out civil servant. He is
in love with the daughter of one of his superiors, a man whose pens the servant
is in charge of cleaning – a role he sees as evidence of favouritism, though he
is mistaken. As with the other stories, here too the main character struggles
with money, and is overly aware of class divisions. Underlying the text there
is the same thread about the importance of human life that can be found
elsewhere. When the diarist heads onto the streets we are told “On the streets
there was nobody; just old women, hiding from the rain inside their dresses, and
Russian merchants under umbrellas, and couriers came into my field of view”.
“Nobody” means nobody well born – our narrator is a complete and utter snob, no
matter how little reason he has to feel superior.
Dog Days
I wonder if Mikhail Bulgakov was inspired by “The Notes of a Madman” to create “The Heart of a Dog”. In Gogol’s story, too, we have dogs communicating. The narrator, in the first real sign of his madness, hears his love’s dog communicating with another dog, and is, naturally, amazed. I too was amazed, and had to check I hadn’t forgotten how to read Russian – but the translation I found confirmed my suspicions about the meaning. Eventually the narrator decides to use the dogs, who are apparently writing letters to each other, as a way of finding out more about his superior’s daughter and her life. He follows the second dog home and is stopped by the dog’s owner. The following is funny enough to translate at length.
“What can I do for you?” The girl asked. “I need to speak with your dog!” I said. She was a stupid one, all right! I understood just at that moment that she was not right in the head! But then the dog appeared, barking away; I wanted to grab it but – the bitch – it almost clamped its teeth around my nose. Just then I saw, however, its lair in the corner. Aha! – that’s what I needed. I went over, tore up the straw bedding in its wooden cage and, to my great pleasure, drew out a bundle of scraps of paper. The dreadful bitch, seeing this, first bit my thigh, and then, when it smelled that I’d stolen its paper, began to wail and hang onto me. “No, my dear, farewell” – and I ran off.”
I like this extract. It made me laugh when I first read it.
It makes little sense and is hilariously slapstick. I think that’s the thing I
like most about “The Notes of a Madman” – it’s actually pretty funny.
Madness à la Quixote
But it’s all not very original or inspired. The initial
delusions of the narrator become full-blown madness once he discovers, having
read the dogs’ letters – themselves highly funny and not particularly sane,
that the daughter he is hoping to marry is in fact betrothed to another. The
news leads to a complete collapse in the man’s identity, out of the ashes of
which he decides to remake himself as the King of Spain. This is the first key
hint towards the big literary influence on the story: Don Quixote. The
narrator hopes to persuade the girl to marry him instead by believing that, as
the King of Spain, she wouldn’t be able to refuse him. When he is eventually
thrown out of his house, and even taken to prison, like the hero of Cervantes’
novel, our narrator chooses to interpret everything according to his
imagination. The prison becomes “Spain.”
Don Quixote seems to be a big model for “The Notes of a Madman”. Both stories have main characters whose madness allows them to repurpose the world in such a way as to prevent it from doing them harm.
Cervantes’ influence is just too great here. The story is funny, but that’s not enough to elevate it up to “The Overcoat” or even “The Nose” in importance; meanwhile the decline into madness is something we’ve seen plenty of times in more modern culture, so it doesn’t have nearly as strong an impact as it probably did back when Gogol was writing. The story is good, but it’s just nothing special next to some of the other Petersburg Tales.
Conclusion
If you want to read these stories, you’ll end up getting a copy of Gogol’s collected stories, or a copy of the Petersburg Tales specifically. Either way, my recommendation isn’t that much use here. “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” are both fantastic stories that are worth reading again and again, and worth the price of admission. These other stories are good, and give you something else to look at, but I wouldn’t rush out to buy them if they were sold on their own. The one remaining story, “The Portrait”, is the longest of the bunch and also, I think, one of the most exciting. In a few weeks I hope to have a piece on it up here too.
“The Nose”: Introduction – Not just a Strange Idea
What an odd idea it is to write a story about a man who loses his nose! After all, no one has ever woken up to find theirs has vanished unless I am much mistaken. But this is precisely the starting point for Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose”. In this piece I’d like to share a summary and interpretation of Gogol’s story, and my own thoughts on why it’s absolutely worth reading.
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), writer of strange tales of Saint Petersburg, and himself a bearer of a fantastic nose!
“The Nose” does have a strange premise. 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. 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 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. 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. Though it’s a story about a nose, “The Nose” has a lot of depth and flavour to it.
Translations from the Russian are all my own.
The Story of “The Nose”
Part I: Ivan Yakovlevich
One morning the barber Ivan Yakovlevich wakes up and has his
breakfast as usual. However, to his great surprise, he finds that in the middle
of the loaf of bread he has just cut there is a nose. “A nose, that was exactly
what it was! And what was more, it seemed to belong to someone he knew…”
Already the initial strangeness of finding the nose is compounded by the absurd
logic of Gogol’s world, where a man can recognise the nose of another with such
certainty. (In much the same way, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” begins with a strange
event, but the true strangeness comes in the reactions of Gregor Samsa’s
relatives).
The nose belongs to a civil servant, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, whose whiskers Ivan Yakovlevich trims a few times each week. 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. 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”. Thus ends the first part of the story.
Part II: Collegiate Assessor Kovalev
Next we wake up with the man with the missing nose,
Collegiate Assessor Kovalev. After noticing a small spot on his nose the night
before, he now discovers the whole thing is missing. After a brief detour into social
status in Imperial Russia, Gogol then takes us and Kovalev out onto the street,
where he has to cover his face to avoid being recognised by his acquaintances –
since, as we learn, nothing is more embarrassing for a man of society than
being seen without his nose either by women or by co-workers. But then he sees
on the street ahead none other than his own nose! One thing that must be
mentioned here is that we never learn what a walking nose looks like – Gogol
only talks about the uniform of the organ. But to Kovalev’s dismay the nose has
a higher rank in the civil service than he does.
Still, he needs his nose, so he goes up to “him” inside a
cathedral where “he” has gone to pray. Very awkwardly, Kovalev approaches and
begins to speak. “It’s awfully strange, my dear sir… but it seems to me… you
should know your place. Suddenly I find you here, and where else but a church?
You must agree…” In spite of a few pages all about Kovalev’s rank and pride, everything
collapses into gibberish in front of a superior. Funnier still, are the puns
Gogol sprinkles around the dialogue. “You should know your place” appears to
refer to the nose’s place on his face, but it is just what would be said by a
superior to an inferior too. The nose, naturally, is unimpressed by Kovalev,
and furrows its brows before departing in a hurry. Once again, Gogol plays with
our idea of what the nose must look like.
Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. It is here that Kovalev and his nose have their main encounter. One thing to think about in Gogol’s works is always the role of religion, and especially the devil. What does it mean for “The Nose” that the nose itself is pious?
Kovalev is left alone, and now he tries to find some way of
tracking down the nose again. He tries the police, he tries to place an
advertisement in a newspaper. This last one is particularly funny, as Kovalev’s
pride demands that he cannot let his name go into the paper. Instead, he falls
back onto his acquaintances. “Look, a lot of people know me: Chekhtareva, wife
of the state councillor; and Palagea Grigorievna Podtochina, wife of staff
officer Podtochin. If they find out about this, God help me!” Which leaves the
public to identify the nose without even knowing whose it is, and thus what it
looks like. Another absurd moment. Kovalev goes home, writes a mad letter to a
woman whose daughter he’d been flirting with, accusing her of using witchcraft
to remove his nose, though naturally he has no evidence for it.
But just when all hope seems lost, the policeman from Part I
arrives to say that the nose has been apprehended. What was the nose doing? It
had been trying to flee the city and escape to Riga. As you do. The mad
suggestion that the nose would flee Petersburg is first suggested by Kovalev’s
addled mind a few pages earlier, and most readers (like me) will probably
dismiss it as ridiculous. But this is just further evidence that Gogol’s world
does not run on the same logic as yours or mine. The rest of Part II consists
of Kovalev trying to reattach his nose, but to no avail.
Part III: Back to Normal?
And then one morning, April 7th to be precise,
Collegiate Assessor Kovalev wakes up and his nose is reattached. That’s it. It
reattaches itself just as magically as it vanished. Kovalev is overjoyed, and
heads out into town, determined to do all of the things his nose’s absence had
prevented – flirting and performing his duties as a civil servant.
The story ends with the narrator having a brief commentary
on the theme of his own story. “Whatever you may say, such things do take place
– not too often, but they do”. Is Gogol having one final laugh at the reader? Absolutely.
Almost every story is a little ridiculous, a little unbelievable, a little too
reliant on coincidences. But most are at the very least possible. “The Nose” is
not, and the veneer of factuality given by its use of dates – because we’re also
told at the beginning of Part I, reasonably enough, that the story begins on
March 25th – is just teasing. But who are we to say what’s real and
not real, possible and impossible?
That’s the story of “The Nose”. Now for a few suggestions as
to what this all means – because it has to mean something, right?
Magic, Mystery and Meaning: The Themes of “The Nose”
Clothes and Respectability
For a story that is from its title onwards apparently
concerned with our bodies Gogol’s focus in much of “The Nose” is oddly enough
not on our skin and blood but on the things we use to cover them up. Clothes
are at the centre of social rank in early 19th Century Saint
Petersburg, and Gogol satirises that in his story. By dealing so much with
clothes, Gogol shows how vapid and superficial people were in their
interactions – they don’t care to reach the person beneath the suit. This is
played with most in the case of the nose itself. Kovalev encounters his nose,
but the only physical description is of what the nose is wearing, not what the
thing itself looks like.
The deliberate confusion as to what exactly a nose looks
like is further played up when the nose is caught by a short-sighted policeman
who only recognises that it is a nose and not a man once he has put is glasses
on – otherwise, he says, he would have let him pass out of the city and escape
to Riga without a hitch. People are overly willing, in Gogol’s world and
perhaps our own, to look no further than the rank and respectability indicated
by our clothing when interacting with others. Decorum is an important part of
society, but we should be wary of letting it absorb all of our attention, lest
we and others become nothing more than the clothing we are wearing.
The Russian Table of Ranks created by Peter the Great is indirectly a cause of much woe in Gogol’s stories. In “The Nose” Kovalev’s anxiety about approaching his nose is in part due to the fact that it appears to be of a higher rank than him.
Women and Sex
One of the most infamous works of Gogol criticism is Simon Karlinsky’s The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, which goes through Gogol’s works and finds that the key to understanding them is his repressed homosexuality. I’m not sure how far I agree with Karlinsky, but I think that thinking of “The Nose” as being about sex can prove fruitful. First of all, consider the object itself. Human noses are generally phallic in shape, and in Russian the word “nos/нос” is a masculine noun. The uses of noses, both smell and taste, are also important parts of sex. Furthermore, it’s also worth mentioning that in his correspondence Gogol regularly notes his awkwardness over the size and shape of his own. The shame that Kovalev feels at having a missing nose is directly connected with a much-reduced desire to flirt and see women. So perhaps it’s not a stretch, after all.
The Narrator and The Reading Public
It’s hard to avoid the narrator in “The Nose”. He’s a cheeky
one, always appearing at the most inconvenient times with a wink. When Ivan
Yakovlevich heads to the bridge the narrator decides to stop the action and
tell us a little about him. The same thing happens, a few pages on, with
Kovalev. And then there is the matter of the use of dates in “The Nose”. I
think one layer to the story’s meaning is satirising the reading public’s
demands for what a story must look like. After all, the public like prose
narratives to have an element of factuality to them, in contrast to the more
explicitly artistic verse narrative also popular then in Russia.
Gogol provides us with the outward appearance of veracity –
clear dating, lots of unnecessary details about characters – while contrasting
it with a clearly fantastic and absurd tale. Furthermore, at key moments he reveals
the inadequacy of this factual veneer, such as when discussing the nose’s
independent life – we learn a lot about what he wears and what rank he has, but
as to what the thing actually looks like we are left completely in the dark.
Gogol is poking fun at us here, and what we need to think of a story as “real”.
Simply representing reality as we see it, “The Nose” seems to say, doesn’t get
to the heart of things. We never learn why the nose disappears, no matter how
much detail Gogol gives us – some mysteries go deeper.
Body Positivity
What I think is the most convincing overall interpretation of
“The Nose”, though, is that it is about making us value our bodies more. A nose
is something we can live without, but Gogol is keen to show that that doesn’t
mean it is worthless. Throughout the story there are descriptions of food,
flowers, and snuff – all of which we know Kovalev is unable to enjoy because of
his absent nose. Furthermore, a lot of the language centres around our bodies.
For example, the introduction of Kovalev – “Collegiate Assessor Kovalev woke up
rather early and made a “brrr…” noise with his lips” – shows that from the
moment we wake up our bodies are important to our character. When one of
Kovalev’s attempts to track down his nose fails, the rejection is felt “not
like a hit in the brow, but one right in the eye”.
We don’t think about our bodies until they begin to fail us,
or until one morning we wake up and find a part of them has gone missing.
Gogol’s story, at least to me, seems to bear the message that we ought to care
about them and be grateful for them the whole time. They do a lot of good
things for us.
Conclusion
The magic and mystery of “The Nose” lies in the fact that
the story is so strange that, like with Kafka’s tales, it’s very hard to find
an interpretation that rules out every other one. The more time we spend
thinking about it, the more ideas come into our heads for what exactly the
whole thing means. Ultimately though, that’s not a reason to read the story –
the best reason is that it’s actually quite funny, and completely absurd. It’s
short too. Give it a go.
Here’s a translation of “The Nose”. I might make my own in due course too. For more strangeness, I’ve translated Kafka’s “Before the Law” here.
