The Nose

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in Sorochynsti, Ukraine in 1809 to a Polish mother and an amateur Ukranian playwright and poet. At the age of 19, Gogol moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he tried to make it as an actor and failed, then tried to make it as a poet and failed, eventually buying up all the copies of the books and magazines containing his poems and setting fire to his entire catalog, vowing never to write another poem again. After working a series of academic jobs, Gogol found success as a short story writer beginning in the 1830s. “The Nose” was one of the stories written during this period, while Gogol was living in St. Petersburg. Like the other stories collected in The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil, “The Nose” satirizes the strict class divisions and complex bureaucracy of imperial Russia.

Gogol’s work often satirized the pretensions and corruption of Russia’s political class. “The Nose,” with its intensely vain and ambitious protagonist navigating a gauntlet of venal bureaucrats, is no exception. This is a world where uniform and appearance are more important than basic human decency, where cops solicit for tips and rough up the poor, where doctors are more likely to buy your deformities than treat them, where the working class is treated maliciously and serfdom is considered normal. Materialism, vanity, maltreatment of the poor, the corruption implicit in both the government, the press, the police, and the medical establishment were all Gogol’s targets of satire. “The Nose” lampoons even the notion of moral improvement, as its protagonist learns nothing from his travails and ends the story just as smug, vain, and abusive toward his supposed “inferiors” as he was at the beginning.