A Study Guide for Nikolai Vail'evitch Gogol's "The Nose"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Nikolai Vail'evitch Gogol's "The Nose," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535838696

Book preview

11

The Nose

Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol

1836

Introduction

Lauded as the father of Russian prose realism, nineteenth-century Russian poet and fiction writer Nikolai Gogol also explored the fantastic and the absurd, embedding unlikely, bizarre elements into ostensibly realist stories. In the twentieth century, this genre became identified as magical realism, and it is into this category that stories such as The Nose are now placed. In The Nose, Gogol inserts a strange and unexplained element into an otherwise realistic story about a barber and a civil servant. One man wakes to find a disembodied nose in his loaf of bread, while another arises to find his nose missing. When the civil servant with the missing nose hurries about town, attempting to find his nose, he sees it masquerading as a man. His nose is eventually returned to him, but the police officer who finds the nose confirms that it appeared in human form before he apprehended the nose (as an actual nose). Eventually the protagonist awakens to find his nose once again in place upon his face. At the end of the story, the narrator comments on the strangeness of the story. The only explanation he offers is that sometimes absurd things happen. While the story is occasionally read as though the loss of the nose happened in a dream and was intended to represent the man's fears of castration and loss of virility and power, the work is more commonly regarded as an example of Gogol's desire to experiment with prose forms and to challenge the literary and political status quo in nineteenth-century Russia.

Originally published as Nos in 1836 in the journal Sovremennik, The Nose was later included in the 1842 collection of his works, Sochinennia (Works). It is also available in volume 2 of The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, edited, introduced, and annotated by Leonard J. Kent. The volume was published by Random House in 1964 and reprinted by the University of Chicago Press in 1985.

Author Biography

Born on March 20, 1809, in the village of Velikie Sorochintsy in the Ukrainian region of Russia, Gogol was the first of Maria Ivanovna and Vasilii Afanas'evich Gogol-Ianovsky's children to survive. Gogol's parents were small landowners, whose modest means were challenged