The Nose

The story opens with the sentence “A most extraordinary thing happened in Petersburg on the 25th of March” (203). What follows, as Collegiate Assessor Major Kovalyov’s nose take leave of his face and begins its own life as a high-ranking official and man-about-town, reveals this opener to be a comical understatement. Even in the face of this bizarre and unprecedented development, Kovalyov’s faith in social forms is unshakeable. Rather than allowing his sense of reality to be called into question, he immediately begins fitting this new fact into his present understanding of the world—one dominated by elaborately prescribed demonstrations of class hierarchy. The other characters around him behave in similar ways, following social protocol in the face of events that render those protocols increasingly absurd. The only one who seems to react realistically to the existence of a nose independent of a face is Ivan Yakovlevich, who ditches it in the river in hopes he isn’t discovered by police, which of course he is.

Oddly enough, Kovalyov fails to see the absurdity of his situation even after the newspaper clerk tells him he risks the newspaper’s reputation if he were to print an ad asking for the return of Kovalyov’s nose. His first concern is that his name be kept out of it—he has “a large circle of friends: Mrs. Chekhtaryov, the widow of a State Councilor, Pelageya Grigoryevna Podtochin, the widow of a first lieutenant” and he fears what would happen if they were to learn of his misfortune (215). He identifies his friends by their rank (or that of their husbands), indicating that what he values in these friendships is the status they confer and that what he fears is the loss of that status. The clerk, for his part, calls the situation “absurd,” but not because it defies the accepted boundaries of reality. Just last week, he says, a “similar incident” occurred. Another civil servant came to place an ad about a poodle that had run away. “You wouldn’t think there was anything in that, would you? And yet it turned out to be a libellous statement. You see, the poodle was the treasurer of some institution or other” (217). In the face of the inexplicable, both Kovalyov and the clerk are concerned chiefly with their own reputations. Whatever happens must be made to fit into their existing understanding of etiquette, law, and social hierarchy. 

The story’s narrator possesses an insight that eludes its protagonist. At the moment of Kovalyov’s greatest happiness, when his lost nose has been returned to him, the narrator observes that “nothing lasts very long in this world, and that is why even joy is not so poignant after the first moment. A moment later it grows weaker still and at last it merges imperceptibly into one’s ordinary mood, just as a circle made in the water by a pebble at last merges into its smooth surface” (223). Here, the narrator deflates the expectations that attach to the short story form: Kovalyov will not seize this opportunity to reevaluate his life, to appreciate himself and the people around him on their own terms rather than seeking advantage at every turn. The experience of losing such a vital part of himself has not taught him to appreciate what he has. Instead, he almost immediately forgets his joy, and once he finds the nose attached to his face again, he forgets his anguish as well.

In The Nose, society itself is absurd, and the impossible occurrence at the story’s center only serves to highlight the absurdity of the ordinary conventions that surround that central event. Gogol’s narrator ends the tale with an appropriate shrug: “But then where do you not find all sorts of absurdities? […] Say what you like, but such things do happen—not often, but they do happen” (232).