The Nose Knows

Hello, Friends!

It has not been long since the death of my dear friend, Pushkin.  It has been hard on us all.  Indeed, Russia lost her premier poet.  The loss of him still echoes down the streets and through the minds and hearts of the people who so loved him.  In the pubs which I have frequented, hardly a night goes by without at least half a dozen toasts being raised in his name.

A Portrait of Gogol

Since his death, I have once again become acquainted with the group of story tellers with whom he associated.  One in particular of his colleagues has a style of story that seems to me most appropriate in these dark and upsetting times.  Nikolai Gogol has knack for the disturbing and fantastical that suits my dark mood as of late.  Furthermore, it was my pleasure to have stayed with him on his estate to proofread some of his upcoming work and to learn more about the man himself.

To say that Gogol is a strange fellow would not be off course, though I do feel that it fails to encapsulate the experience of interacting with him.  In speaking with him, I was able to learn some of his incidental history.  He was born in Ukraine under the name Nikolai Ianovskii in 1810, and later transplanted himself into St. Petersburg, bypassing Moscow so as not to ruin the experience ( Davydov, 2006).  Furthermore, he said to me that he found Petersburg to be underwhelming upon his arrival, though I can't imagine to what he was comparing it.  He simply said he thought it would be less dark and gloomy.

Kovalev, face to face with his Nose

Despite the lack of festive spirit, Gogol has managed to find in the daily grindings of the common people a character to use in his tales.  Seemingly based on his own experience, he has fashioned a character so thoroughly unremarkable that he might easily be anyone's uncle or father.  A simple clerk, to whom any could relate or pity (Davydov, 2006).  However, it is the situations that these little men find themselves in that makes his tales remarkable.  His tales have included a man who collects the rights to the names of dead serfs, a man so obsessed with his new coat and being respected that he ends up haunting the streets of St. Petersburg stealing coats after death, and even a man who must compete with his own nose.

The final tale being my favorite, I feel I must give it a special treatise.  In the beginning, Kovalev wakes at the changing of the calendar (Seifrid, 1993) to find that his nose has departed from his face and become its own being.  He then embarks on a great search for the missing feature, enlisting the help of the police and other city offices in his endeavor.  It is later found that the nose had left, probably due to the regularly occurring trips Kovalev had been taking to the barber, at which points his nose was subjected to foul smelling ointments the barber used on Kovalev's face.  After a few weeks, the nose appears back on his face without explanation.

What is fascinating about the tale, besides the adventure and strangeness of it all, is how the story has been left open for interpretation.  Rarely have any of my stories been so odd and yet subtle with their message so as to leave room for so many directions of thought.  One man I talked to insisted that the lack of focus on smells in this story about a nose was as significant as representing the influence of the west, stating that, "Seen in this context, 'The Nose' actualizes strinkingly well the locus of Gogol's reaction to the relationships that were beginning to materialize at the time among the Imperial government, medical science, hygiene, and olfaction." (Klymentiev, 2009)  With the destruction of smells symbolizing the increase of western influence, the book does take on a certain slavophile tone.

Meanwhile, another friend I met at a pub thought of the book entirely differently.  He told me over drinks that he thought the major message was one of mistaken identity, or rather, missing identity (Seifrid, 1993).  He examined the nose not knowing its place, as well as many people changing their title by switching between the military and civilian tiers of ranking.  He continued to talk at length about how the book seemed to purposefully remove truth from symbol.  Most people seem to think that Gogol was making some kind of statement about the European influence on this country.  However, I can't help but wonder if Gogol was really purposefully considering all of this, or if he simply wanted to write a story about how insecure he felt about his nose.

Davydov, Sergei. "Gogol's Petersburg." New England Review (10531297), vol. 27, no. 1, Winter2006, pp. 122-127. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.uvu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=19983812&site=eds-live.

Klymentiev, Maksym. "The Dark Side of 'The Nose': The Paradigms of Olfactory Perception in Gogol''s 'The Nose'." Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes, no. 2/3, 2009, p. 223. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.uvu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.40871408&site=eds-live.

Seifrid, Thomas. "Suspicion toward Narrative: The Nose and the Problem of Autonomy in Gogol's 'Nos'." The Russian Review, no. 3, 1993, p. 382. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.uvu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.10.2307.130737&site=eds-live.