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Around "The Nose"
- Northwestern University Press
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Sergei Bocharov Around "The Nose" • Skryeshi ikh v taine litsa Tvoego ot miatezha chelovecheska. -Ps. 30:21 In the covert of thy presence [litso, "face"] thou hidest them from the plots of men. -Ps.31:20 THESE REMARKS are a continuation of my attempt to connect the famous enigma of "The Nose" with Gogol's philosophy of humanity, an attempt begun in my article "Zagadka 'Nosa' i taina litsa" ("The Enigma of 'The Nose' and the Mystery of the Face").1 That article had two initial premises. The first was that careful attention must be paid to the very character of the story's strange subject, the very choice of such an absurd and ridiculous subject, the nose itself with its specific physical and physiological character, which for some reason so intrigued Gogol that he continually touched upon it in artistic texts, letters, and album notes. In these persistent jokes on the theme of the nose there is some point we have not yet deciphered, and it seems possible to speak of a special complex of the nose in Gogol. Of course this complex and this point are present in the story "The Nose." But-and here lies the second premise of that earlier article-in Gogol this theme of the nose has a significance that transcends the object itself. To understand this strange story there are two equally important requirements: to deal with the "nose" not merely as a comical object but as a highly expressive and in its way weighty object for Gogol; and also not to get stuck on it, that is, not to find oneself in the position of the characters in the story, who are hopelessly bewildered by this object and this word: "He started to rub his eyes and grope: a nose, a nose indeed!" (III:50). In the literature on Gogol there is an authoritative work that, one might say, gets stuck on "the nose" in just this way: the well-known study by V. V. Vinogradov .Z To explain the story Vinogradov introduces an encyclopedic volume of material on the motif of the nose in language and in 19 Sergei Bocharov the literature of GogoI's era. His study of the story consists entirely of this "nosological" commentary; the plot is deduced from linguistic puns connected with "the nose." In Vinogradov's work there is much useful material and many lively observations, but faced with the enigma of "The Nose" it is just as powerless as the characters in the story are when faced with the events that happen in it. Like the police officer in the story who adduces his nearsightedness as justification for not immediately recognizing the departing gentleman as Major Kovalev's nose, Vinogradov's meticulous analysis is a nearsighted one, since it looks no further than "its nose" and does not depart from the sphere of the story's apparent action. Yes, one must pay literary-critical attention to the nose in Gogol, but at the same time one must go beyond the nose and see where it leads us in the world of GogoI's images. It leads us, as we may discover with surprise, to the mysteries of Gogol's anthropology. And above all it naturally leads us to the problem of the image of the human face in Gogol. The best introduction to this theme of the face in Gogol is a quotation from Innokentii Annenskii's article on "The Portrait": Gogol wrote two stories: one he devoted to the nose, the other to the eyes. ... Ifwe place these two emblems-of corporeality and of spirituality -side by side and imagine the figure of Major Kovalev, who for unknown reasons bought himself a medal, and the shade of Chartkov, who dies in insane delirium, then we feel if only for a moment all the impossibility, all the absurdity of a being who combines in himself nose and eyes, body and soul. ... But indeed it may be that a sort of higher humor 0/ creation, no longer accessible to us, is manifested here, and that the enigma of man, tormenting for us, is solved as simply as possible in the sphere of the higher categories of existence.3 The critic-poet's meditation is remarkable for the sensitivity with which it corresponds to the picture of humanity that saturates all of GogoI's work in a sort of fragmented and dissolved form. The expression "kartina cheloveka" ("picture of humanity")-the title of an anthropological work by...