The Russki Files: Remembering Gogol, Nose and All

Sometimes, I like to imagine that the world of Russian literature is a 21st century high school with all the classic stereotypes. Mikhail Bulgakov, playwright and author of The Master and Margarita, would be the drama geek who comes to life onstage with lofty dreams and operatic crescendos pounding in his heart. Fyodor Dostoevsky would be the quiet, poetic boy with a saintly face that can, without warning, alight with a devilish grin. Aleksandr Pushkin, essentially the founder of Russian literature as we know it, would be the captain of the football team, the rock star, the most popular senior whom everyone wants to become or date. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, author of Dead Souls, The Inspector General, and many short stories, would be the nerd whose underwear is run up a flagpole every day during gym class.

This is not to say that Gogol was untalented. He had one of the most distinctive voices of the nineteenth century, and his works are still regarded as some of the most influential in world literature. But even with all this acclaim, he still comes across as a little pathetic.

His classmates, for self-explanatory reasons, nicknamed him “the mysterious dwarf.” He was a short, sallow, somewhat doughy man with round eyes and a long, pointed nose. It is clear from his writings that his nose was a serious source of misery for him. In Dead Souls’ “The Nose,” a low-ranking public official wakes up one morning without a nose, then spots it parading around the city in a uniform, putting on airs and out-ranking him. In “The Overcoat,” a policeman in the process of arresting a ghost takes snuff to revive his frostbitten nose, but the ghost is allergic and sneezes all over the policeman. Gogol also makes several disparaging nose references about his other characters, so clearly there was something of a fixation here.

Throughout his life, Gogol’s literary career appeared less than illustrious. He had recurrent trouble with the censors (not that this was unique to Gogol’s struggle—in fact, it was pretty much a guarantee for any Russian writer up until quite recently). In 1837, when the revered Pushkin was shot in a duel and died, a mourning Gogol returned from abroad, hoping to be hailed as the nation’s new greatest writer. Still, no one took him seriously.

The publication of Dead Souls in 1842 did bring him considerable merit, but over the next 10 years, his health and sanity considerably declined. With fasting and self-flagellation, he adopted a harshly ascetic lifestyle and sank into a creative depression. The last ten days of his life were spent burning manuscripts, claiming that the Devil had tricked him into burning said manuscripts, refusing all food, and dying in agony.

And yet Gogol’s strangeness, his nose fixation, and his pathetic end cannot negate his greatness as a writer. The details of his style were almost anachronistically playful, such as his description of a village in “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich:” “. . . Looking at it from a distance, only roofs are visible, rising one above another, and greatly [resemble] a plate full of pancakes.” In bizarre stories like “The Nose,” he wrote semi-absurdist stories before absurdism was even a real movement. In “The Diary of a Madman,” he wrote of one man’s decline into madness with an uncanny (and again, anachronistic) understanding of a lunatic’s logic—stemming, no doubt, from the author’s own struggles with insanity. And more than anything, in a time when wealth and bureaucracy ruled Russia, Gogol was an advocate of the lowest of the low, the downtrodden, the unfathomably awkward.

It is hard to reconcile such an outstanding legacy with such a miserable life. I can only hope that, wherever he is, Gogol has found peace and realized his own worth—and most of all, I hope he understands now that noses are beautiful in every size and shape.

--Emmaline Silverman

Image by Bublik