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Four contrasting short stories. All have satire or outright humour, but the overall mood is poignant, or even tragic.

They tend to have more detail about Russian, and “Little Russian�� (Ukrainian), life, process, and society than I wanted, but that’s my problem, not any fault of Gogol’s.

1. Old-Fashioned Farmers, aka The Old World Landowners, 1835, 4*

��The beautiful rain patters luxuriously on the leaves, flows in murmuring rivulets, inclining your limbs to repose.��

A story of bucolic abundance, tinged with sadness. It has explicit echoes of from Greek mythology.

The narrator reminisces about staying in a manor house, with a loved-up but childless elderly couple, generous in their hospitality, and kind to their staff and locals. With so much salting, preserving, and drying, the kitchen is like a chemical lab, and the stores are always full (despite ).


Image: Cover of an old Russian edition ()

��The most trifling causes produce the greatest events.��
A precursor to , involving a feline, rather than an insect, takes the story down a very different path.


2. The Squabble, aka The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovitch Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich, 1835, 3*

A tragic-comic story of disproportionality and the high price of sticking to one’s guns.

The two Ivans are total opposites in many ways, but live next door to each other and have long been the best of friends. They’re comfortably off, and getting old. A potentially trivial disagreement leads to one calling the other a “goose��, which is taken as a profound insult to the other’s honour. Evidently, it’s far more offensive in Russian than English.


Image: A Russian goose, by Ilya Ogarev. “Alluding to the selfish and sometimes aggressive behavior of geese, calling someone a goose would mean the person is predictably looking after himself and quite cunning.�� ()

The feud gets worse, petitions are made to a judge, townsfolk try to engineer a reconciliation, lawyers are engaged ( came to mind).

Noses are often mentioned, which might seem irrelevant if it weren’t for Gogol’s famous story, "The Nose" (below).


3. The Nose, 1836, 3*

A surreal, sometimes slapstick, comedy about the constraints of a rigid social hierarchy. It could be adapted as a children’s picture book (and has been: The Nose), or perhaps a Monty Python sketch, although in its full form, it’s a satire about rank.

A barber finds a customer’s nose in his freshly-baked morning loaf of onion bread and tries to dispose of it. Meanwhile, that customer awakes and is shocked to discover that his nose is missing, so he tries to find it. When he does, it is the size of a man, is wearing a uniform of superior rank to his own, and asserts its right to independent existence.


Image: Cover of "The Nose": A Stylistic and Critical Companion to Nikolai Gogol’s Story (which I’ve not read)

I thought of all the nasal idioms in English: toffee-nosed, turning one’s nose up, being nosey, putting someone’s nose out of joint, and apparently there are similar ones in Russian:
“‘Torn off�� (if it is too curious), ‘lifted up�� (if you have a high opinion of yourself), or ‘hung up�� (with obvious defeat and failure). By the 19th century, there has been an extensive literature in Russian prose dedicated to nose references�� (from ).
Indeed, Gogol makes lots of references to noses in "The Squabble" (above), and was apparently teased for his own nose.


4. The Overcoat, 1842, 5*

A tragic, Kafkaesque morality tale about social isolation, bureaucracy, and the danger of judging by appearances.

Akakii has a menial office job in a department where no one respects him and promotion is unlikely. But he is dutiful and never complains, “content with his fate��.

When his threadbare overcoat cannot hold yet another repair, he saves up for a year to afford a new one, excitedly planning the design with a tailor. The coat is worth the wait and sacrifices. For the first time in his life, he feels confident, visible, and respected by colleagues and strangers alike. But it seems more like mockery that he doesn’t recognise (he comes across as being on the autistic spectrum).

A twist sends him on a wild goose chase through officialdom, never able to find the right person, or to have followed the correct procedure. The ending is Dickensian, but also with echoes of Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener (see my review HERE).


Image: Cover by Igor Grabar, 1890s ()

More Gogol

I’ve reviewed four Gogol short stories, including this, in a GR review, HERE.