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Gogol’s “The Nose�� (1835), is an early triumph of surrealism, daring and delightful in the way it jars and disjoins one reality from another, but it is also a vivid realistic depiction of the sights and sounds of early 19th century St. Petersburg (including the essential bridges, buildings and monuments), a savage criticism of the way petty bureaucrats jockeyed for position within Russia’s complex government classification system, as well as a critical examination of the nature of story-telling itself.

Our tale begins as Yakovlevich the Barber cuts into his breakfast roll and recognizes—concealed inside his morning pastry—the wandering nose of “Major�� Kolyakov the College Inspector, which he then discards surreptitiously, near the river. The story then shifts to the awakening Major Kolyakov, who soon realizes his nose has absconded, leaving behind nothing but a space in the middle of his face “as flat as a pancake.�� Soon—muffled, concealing his shame--he goes out onto the St. Petersburg streets and spies what he is sure is his nose (also muffled) leaving a carriage and entering into the house of an important official. But, worse than all this, is the fact that that his former nose is now wearing a uniform, and the nose’s rank is higher than that of the “Major�� himself.

Why a nose? Well, Gogol had an odd shaped nose, which we know because he himself ridiculed its appearance in his letters, and I take that as pretty good evidence other people made fun of it too. But of course, although the nose may be self-referential, it is also phallic: what better symbol for a man deprived of the accoutrements of power than a missing, errant nose?

This is a miraculous piece of fiction, and—like all miracles—it doesn’t open itself readily to convincing explanations. It owes much of its ineffable power, I believe, to its early, daring and dreamlike shift from a nose-sized nose to a human-sized nose stepping down from a carriage, a shift Gogol accomplishes without any attempt to explain or excuse the transformation. If the reader will accept this absurdity, he will accept anything. And—speaking for one reader at least—I accepted it without thinking, and--from this point on--Gogol had on completely his spell.