“Nos” (1836; “The Nose”) is one of Gogol's best known as well as most perplexing and enigmatic stories. The story recounts an incident in which a petty Russian official wakes one morning to find that his nose is missing from his face; he later encounters the nose riding around Petersburg in a carriage, dressed as a government official. While “The Nose” was regarded as a humorous but trivial anecdote for almost a century, critics in the twentieth century variously interpreted the tale as a social satire on Russian culture, a Marxist critique of socioeconomic class, a psychosexual fantasy, and a meta-narrative about the process of storytelling. “The Nose” was first published in 1836, in the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), edited by the Russian writer Alexandr Pushkin; the first publication to which Gogol submitted “The Nose” rejected it on the grounds that it was vulgar. In its early drafts, the story was entitled “The Dream,” and the entire plot was written as a chimera; the title in Russian, “Nos,” spelled backwards is son, the Russian word for dream. “The Nose” was adapted as an opera of the same title by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and first performed in Leningrad in 1930.

reader2121 wrote:I just finished reading this. I interpret the short story as a serch for social place in a heavily structured society. I like Gogol better than Tolstoy. The latter seems more concerned with morality. Gogol is crazy and fun and magical.