The Nose (Gogol)

The Nose is a short story by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, published in 1836, in which a minor Saint Petersburg official, Major Kovalyov, wakes to find his nose missing from his face and then encounters it about the city dressed in the uniform of a State Councillor, a rank higher than his own, going about its own affairs entirely independent of him. Kovalyov's frantic, humiliating attempts to recover his nose and restore his social standing, and the story's abrupt, unexplained resolution when the nose simply reappears on his face one morning, satirize the obsessive Russian preoccupation with official rank that followed Peter the Great's introduction of the Table of Ranks. Set amid recognizable Saint Petersburg landmarks, the story's matter-of-fact treatment of an impossible event helped make it a touchstone of the city's literary identity and an early example of the absurdist mode that later writers, including exponents of magical realism, would develop further.