The nose (Gogol)

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The nose ( Russian Нос - Nos ) is a story by the Russian poet Nikolai Wassiljewitsch Gogol from 1836. It is one of the Petersburg novels .

action

The story mixes the real everyday with the absurd: the barber Ivan Jakowlewitsch finds a nose in his bread at breakfast that belongs to the 37-year-old college assessor Kowaljow, whom he shaves every Wednesday and Sunday. Fearful, he wraps his nose and throws it off a bridge into the Neva . Accordingly, Kovalyov wakes up and finds that he is missing his nose. When he set out to report this to the prefect of police, he met his own nose in the uniform of a state councilor. He follows her, stunned, speaks to her, but is turned away by her. He does not meet the police prefect, a newspaper rejects an advertisement through his nose. Kovalyov returns home perplexed when it is reported that the nose had been arrested at the moment when she was about to board the post van to Riga because she had a forged passport. The policeman who arrested the nose wrapped it in a piece of paper and brought it to Kovalev. The joy is short-lived, however, because the nose does not want to stick in its old place, all attempts fail, and the doctor cannot help either. Meanwhile, the rumor has spread about a nose that walks daily on Nevsky Prospect . But one day Kovalyov wakes up again with his nose in his face as if nothing had happened.

interpretation

In this story, Gogol combined absolute absurdities with everyday occurrences. The absurd happening is told like a banality. The story has been interpreted many times and in different ways. It is understood, for example, as a symbol of Kovalyov's grandiose ambitions, which rise far above his actual social position. But the nose is certainly also a parable for Gogol's understanding of the world: this is what happens in a world in which the devil is at work. People are torn from their security by the loss of their nose and lose their self-confidence. Reality is distorted by the grotesque event. The beautiful appearance, the facade is destroyed. But where many Russian authors have failed to interpret, the thoughtful reader realizes that it was all just a grotesque dream. The story is considered to be the first surrealist prose piece avant la lettre in Russian literature.

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