The Nose

“‘The Devil knows how it happened,’ he said at last, scratching behind his ear with his hand. ‘Did I come home drunk last night, I really can’t say. And yet the whole thing is quite impossible.’”

The supernatural and drunkenness are two explanations both Yakovlevich and Kovalyov resort to in an attempt to explain the inexplicable.

“Ivan Yakovlevich, like every Russian working man, was a terrible drunkard.”

Interestingly, though social ills exist across class lines in The Nose, the focus is more on Yakovlevich’s alcohol habit over Kovalyov’s. This may reveal a cultural or authorial bias on Gogol’s part against the working class, as he relies on drunkenness to emphasize Yakovlevich’s apparent buffoonery.

“Knowing the rules, Ivan Yakovlevich took off his cap some way off and, coming up promptly, said, ‘I hope your honour is well.’”

For Yakovlevich to be so humble and almost beggarly towards the police officer, as the police officer later does the same to Kovalyov, illustrates the relationship between class and law enforcement. For Yakovlevich’s class, the etiquette is to be respectful towards the police in this way. For Kovalyov’s class, the proper etiquette is for the police officer to be respectful towards Kovalyov.

“Kovalyov was a Caucasian Collegiate Assessor. He had obtained that rank only two years earlier and that was why he could not forget it for a moment; and to add to his own importance and dignity, he never described himself as a Collegiate Assessor, that is to say, a civil servant of the eighth rank, but always as a major, that is to say, by the corresponding rank in the army.”

Kovalyov’s status as a Collegiate Assessor is somewhat tenuous, as he obtained that rank in one of the empire’s distant colonies in the Caucasus rather than through the much more rigorous academic routes in the imperial center. For this reason, he takes his rank and title extremely seriously. Rank is incredibly important to him, but he realizes that rank is pointless without his nose, further increasing the comical effect of the nose itself being in uniform.

“Major Kovalyov was not averse to matrimony, either, but only if he could find a girl with a fortune of two hundred thousand. The reader can, therefore, judge for himself the state in which the major was when he saw, instead of a fairly handsome nose of moderate size, a most idiotic, flat, smooth place.”

Women weren’t the only thing on Kovalyov’s mind. He was after money, hence his pursuit of obtaining higher civil ranks and bragging about his own current rank constantly. Gogol here reveals that nothing will change Kovalyov’s perspective from the start.

“Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks at the front doors of a house; a most inexplicable thing happened before his very eyes: a carriage drew up before the entrance, the carriage door opened, a gentleman in uniform jumped out and, stooping, rushed up the steps. Imagine the horror and, at the same time, amazement of Kovalyov when he realized that this was his own nose! At this extraordinary sight everything went swimming before his eyes. He felt that he could hardly stand on his feet.”

Kovalyov reacts with more surprise and shock at the personified nose than he does initially at his missing nose. Not only has the nose taken on a life and personality of its own, but it (he) is also apparently a man of great status and wealth, possessing everything Kovalyov dreams of for himself.

“He hastened into the cathedral, pushing his way through the crowd of old beggarwomen with bandaged faces and only two slits for the eyes, at whom he used to laugh so much before, and went into the church.”

In contrast to the personified Nose, who is pious, prayerful, and religious, Gogol’s narrator reveals that Kovalyov used to make fun of the faithful poor, revealing Kovalyov’s dislike of both religion and the lower classes.

“Of course—er—you see—I—I am a major and—and you must admit that it isn’t right for—er—a man of my rank to walk about without a nose. I mean—er—a tradeswoman selling peeled oranges on Voskressensky Bridge can sit there without a nose, but for a man like me who expects to obtain the post of a governor…”

Kovalyov’s halting argument here reveals the centrality of social status in his view of the world and of himself. He believes his rank entitles him to a nose as a special privilege.

“A man in his position ought first of all apply to the City Police Headquarters, not because they dealt with matters of this kind there, but because instructions coming from there might be complied with much more quickly than those coming from any other place.”

That Kovalyov is able to go to any institution of the government and report his missing nose reveals that the Russian Empire was very loosely centralized across departments. That the services of the police, who are everywhere, are portrayed in “The Nose” as being contingent upon one’s class speaks volumes about the corrupt state of law enforcement in 1830s St. Petersburg. He’s also correct in the end, as the police officer is the one who delivers his nose back to him.

“And so, having made up his mind, he told the cabman to drive him to the nearest newspaper office, and all the way there he kept hitting the cabman on the back with his fist, repeating, ‘Faster, you rogue! Faster, you scoundrel!’—‘Good Lord, sir! What are you hitting me for’ said the cabman, shaking his head and flicking his reins at the horse, whose coat was as long as a lapdog’s.”

Not only does Kovalyov make fun of the working classes and speak disdainfully of them, he physically and verbally abuses them even as he’s relying on their services. Through Kovalyov’s character, we get a small glimpse of the treatment of the working poor in 19th-century Imperial Russia.

“If everyone were to write that his nose had run away, why—as it is, people are already saying that we are publishing a lot of absurd stories and false rumors.”

Gogol takes the opportunity here to satirize news publishing. Kovalyov’s story happens to be very real and very pertinent, arguably over everyone else’s in the office save the 19-year old serf selling her labor, but the newspaper clerk won’t print it because it sounds untrue, implying he would print untrue things if they sounded true.

“But nothing lasts very long in the 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.”

In something of a comical climax to the narrative, Gogol’s narrator notes that even though Kovalyov viewed the loss of the nose as an unmitigated disaster, his joy at its return is short-lived.

“One gentleman declared indignantly that he failed to understand how in our enlightened age such absurd stories could be spread abroad and that he was surprised the government paid no attention to it. This gentleman evidently was one of those gentlemen who would like to involve the government in everything, even in his daily tiffs with his wife.”

Gogol, through his narrator, mocks the bourgeois desire for order and rationality in all aspects of life. This “gentleman’s” comically ineffectual demand for good sense serves as a segue into the story’s concluding passage, in which the narrator insists that some things don’t make sense.