 The Nose by Nikolai Gogol A short story first published in 1836. A barber of St. Petersburg awakens to find that the nose of a customer, a petty official, has lept off his face and developed a life of its own for no apparent reason. On 25 March an unusually strange event occurred in St. Petersburg. For that morning Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch, a dweller on the Vozkresensky Prospekt (his name is lost now--it no longer figures on a signboard bearing a portrait of a gentleman with a soaped cheek, and the words: "Also, Blood Let Here")--for that morning Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch awoke early, and caught the smell of newly baked bread. Raising himself a little, he perceived his wife (a most respectable dame, and one especially fond of coffee) to be just in the act of drawing newly baked rolls from the oven. "Prascovia Osipovna," he said, "I would rather not have any coffee for breakfast, but, instead, a hot roll and an onion,"--the truth being that he wanted both but knew it to be useless to ask for two things at once, as Prascovia Osipovna did not fancy such tricks. "Oh, the fool shall have his bread," the dame reflected. "So much the better for me then, as I shall be able to drink a second lot of coffee." And duly she threw on to the table a roll. Ivan Yakovlevitch donned a jacket over his shirt for politeness' sake, and, seating himself at the table, poured out salt, got a couple of onions ready, took a knife into his hand, assumed an air of importance, and cut the roll asunder. Then he glanced into the roll's middle. To his intense surprise he saw something glimmering there. He probed it cautiously with the knife--then poked at it with a finger. "Quite solid it is!" he muttered. "What in the world is it likely to be?" He thrust in, this time, all his fingers, and pulled forth--a nose! His hands dropped to his sides for a moment. Then he rubbed his eyes hard. Then again he probed the thing. A nose! Sheerly a nose! Yes, and one familiar to him, somehow! Oh, horror spread upon his feature! Yet that horror was a trifle compared with his spouse's overmastering wrath. PORTRAIT: Nikolai Gogol by F. A. Moller (1840). CITATION INFORMATION (in MLA format): Gogol, Nikolai. "The Nose." Gleeditions, 17 Apr. 2011, www.gleeditions.com/thenose/students/pages.asp?lid=109&pg=4. Originally published in Taras Bulba and Other Tales, by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1918, pp. 155-88. |
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