Suspicion toward Narrative

In the final version of Nos that Gogol prepared for his 1842 Sochineniia, it is 25 March when Kovalev discovers he has no nose and 7 April when the appendage mysteriously reappears.' In light of Russian cultural history these dates can hardly appear innocent: the twelve-day gap between them is precisely that obtaining in the nineteenth century between Russia's Julian calendar and the Gregorian chronography of the West, so that the nose is in fact lost and restored overnight. The dates could, of course, be mere artifacts of the dream device Gogol had used in an earlier version of the story to explain away its absurdities (Vprochem vse eto, chto ni opisano zdes', videlos' maioru vo sne).2 But the fact that this discrepancy is peculiar to Russia's historical situation-so peculiar, in fact, that it could be taken as an emblem of that situation-suggests something more profound may be going on and that Gogol's preservation of the dates was not happenstance. By marking the narrative boundaries this way Gogol situates the nose's escapades not in some generalized absurd universe or even in the fantastic terrain of Gogolian Petersburg, but in the definite if anomalous historical space that had defined Russia's existence since Peter the Great

Aesthetics · Art · Character (mathematics) · Dream · Emblem · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Space (punctuation) · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis

• "Gogol's "The Nose

  Open Access•Igor Pilshchikov•Religions•2021

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