"The Nose"

Ksana Blank is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author of Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin (Northwestern University, 2010) and Spaces of Creativity: Essays on Russian Literature and the Arts (Academic Studies Press, 2016).

“Ksana Blank’s companion to Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ is an excellent new resource for students of Russian language and literature… The annotations to the text are remarkably thorough and identify allusions, irony, and colloquialisms that the casual reader may miss and the second-language student may struggle with even while paying great attention. These annotations are informed by a deep understanding of the historical and social context of the work; they not only identify interesting linguistic moments, but also point out ways in which the nineteenth-century Russian reader would have understood Gogol’s text… ‘The Nose’: A Stylistic and Critical Companion is a helpful resource for students of Russian literature as well as for scholars new to Gogol criticism. Its attention to style and language is especially refreshing. It provides a much-needed close reading of the story that will hopefully inspire other, similarly detailed analyses of Gogol’s works.”– Sara Jo Powell, Harvard University, Russian Language Journal“Ksana Blank’s commentary to “The Nose” will be useful not only to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, but also to scholars, particularly to those who do not speak Russian natively. She has an admirable ability to reconstruct the context of Gogol’s St. Petersburg, both in the everyday life of the capital and in the idioms that Gogol consciously fractures and rearranges.” - Michael Wachtel, Princeton University

• Table of Contents Note on Translation and TransliterationIntroduction Part One. How “The Nose” Is MadeН. В. Гоголь «Нос» Annotations to the Russian TextLanguage Game as the Engine of the PlotPart Two. Interpretations 1. Joke, Jest, Anecdote2. Social Satire3. Mockery of the Demonic and of the Sacred4. Chronicle of Folk Superstitions5. A Case of Castration Anxiety6. An Echo of German Romanticism7. Perfect Nonsense8. Shostakovich’s Opera The Nose9. A Play with Reality: “The Nose,” Kafka, and DalíInstead of a ConclusionSelected Bibliography