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This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist masterpiece “The Nose.” Part I focuses on numerous instances of the writer’s wordplay, which is meant to surprise and delight the reader, but which often is lost in English translations. It traces Gogol’s descriptions of everyday life in St. Petersburg, familiar to the writer’s contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical interpretations of the story in Gogol scholarship from the time of its publication to the present, as well as its connections to the works of Shostakovich, Kafka, Dalí, and Kharms.
“Ksana Blank’s companion to Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ is an excellent new resource for students of Russian language and literature… The annotations to the text are remarkably thorough and identify allusions, irony, and colloquialisms that the casual reader may miss and the second-language student may struggle with even while paying great attention. These annotations are informed by a deep understanding of the historical and social context of the work; they not only identify interesting linguistic moments, but also point out ways in which the nineteenth-century Russian reader would have understood Gogol’s text… ‘The Nose’: A Stylistic and Critical Companion is a helpful resource for students of Russian literature as well as for scholars new to Gogol criticism. Its attention to style and language is especially refreshing. It provides a much-needed close reading of the story that will hopefully inspire other, similarly detailed analyses of Gogol’s works.”
– Sara Jo Powell, Harvard University, Russian Language Journal
“Ksana Blank’s commentary to “The Nose” will be useful not only to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, but also to scholars, particularly to those who do not speak Russian natively. She has an admirable ability to reconstruct the context of Gogol’s St. Petersburg, both in the everyday life of the capital and in the idioms that Gogol consciously fractures and rearranges.”
- Michael Wachtel, Princeton University
Table of Contents
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction
Part One. How “The Nose” Is Made
Н. В. Гоголь «Нос»
Annotations to the Russian Text
Language Game as the Engine of the Plot
Part Two. Interpretations
1. Joke, Jest, Anecdote
2. Social Satire
3. Mockery of the Demonic and of the Sacred
4. Chronicle of Folk Superstitions
5. A Case of Castration Anxiety
6. An Echo of German Romanticism
7. Perfect Nonsense
8. Shostakovich’s Opera The Nose
9. A Play with Reality: “The Nose,” Kafka, and Dalí
Instead of a Conclusion
Selected Bibliography