The Nose is a satirical short story by Nikolai Gogol, subsequently made into an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. Written between 1835-1836, the story tells of a St. Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own. Satire is a literary technique of writing or art which exposes the follies of its subject (for example, individuals, organizations, or states) to ridicule, often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. ... This article is in need of attention. ... Nikolai Gogol For the James Bond ally, see General Gogol Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol (Russian: ) (April 1, 1809 - March 4, 1852) was a Ukrainian-born Russian writer. ... The Nose is a satirical opera by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. ... Dmitri Shostakovich Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich (help· info) (Russian: , Dmitrij Dmitrievič Å ostakovič) (September 25 [O.S. September 12] 1906–August 9, 1975) was a Russian composer of the Soviet period. ... Saint Petersburg (Russian: Санкт-Петербу́рг, English transliteration: Sankt-Peterburg), colloquially known as Питер (transliterated Piter), formerly known as Leningrad (Ленингра́д, 1924–1991) and Petrograd (Петрогра́д, 1914–1924), is a city located in Northwestern Russia on the delta of the river Neva at the east end of the Gulf of Finland... Human nose in profile The Nose is a story by Gogol and an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. ...

Plot

The story is in three parts:

Part one

On the 25th of March, a particular barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, finds a nose in his bread which he recognises as that of one of his regular customers, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov (known as 'Major Kovalyov'). He tries to get rid of it by throwing it in the Neva river, but he is caught by a policeman. River Neva (Нева́) is a 74 km long Russian river flowing from the Lake Ladoga (Ладожское Озеро - Ladozhskoye Ozero) through the Carelian Isthmus (Карельский Перешеек - Karelskii Peresheyek) and the city of Saint Petersburg (Санкт-Петербург - Sankt Peterburg) to the Gulf of Finland (Финский Залив - Finskii Zaliv). ...

Part two

Meanwhile Kovalyov wakes and finds his nose missing. He finds and confronts it in the Kazan Cathedral, but it has acquired a higher rank than him and refuses to return to his face. Kovalyov visits the newspaper office to place an advert about the loss of his nose, but is refused. He returns to his flat, where the policeman who caught Ivan finds him and returns the nose (which he caught at a coach station, trying to flee the city). Kovalyov's joy is cut short when he finds that he is unable to re-attach the nose, even with the help of the doctor. He suspects that he has been enchanted by a woman called Podtochina, because he would not marry her daughter. He writes to ask her to undo the spell, but she misinterprets the letter as a proposal to her daughter. Her reply convinces him that she is innocent. In the city, rumours of the nose's activities have spread, and crowds gather in search of it. 19th-century view of the Kazan Cathedral in St. ...

Part three

On the 7th of April, Kovalyov wakes up with his nose reattached. He is carefully shaved by the barber and happily promenades about the city to show off his nose.

Criticism

Richard Peace, in his introduction to the OUP edition, notes that the story's title in Russian (Nos) is the reverse of the Russian word for "dream" (Son). As the unreliable narrator himself notes, the story "contains much that is highly implausible", while an earlier version of the story ended with Kovalyov waking and realising that the story was indeed a dream. Peace also notes that some critics have interpreted the story as referring to a castration complex: the removal of Kovalyov's nose (and its developing a mind of its own) threaten both his chances of acquiring a position of power and of being a success with women. Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes: The Dream, 1883 A girl sleeps in her bed, before reaching REM sleep. ... In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction [1]) is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point of view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability, or a powerful bias, or else simply by a... In Psychoanalysis, the term castration complex refers to fear of losing ones penis among male children. ...

Reference

• Peace, Richard. Introduction to Plays and Petersburg Tales by Gogol. Oxford University Press 1995. ISBN 0192835521.

The Nose was a satirical California-based magazine patterned after Spy Magazine. Spy magazine was founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter. ...