The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol

  When and at what time he started work in the Department and who had appointed him, no one could recall. No matter how many directors and all kinds of supervisors had changed places, he was seen always in the very same place, in the very same position, with the very same post, as the very same civil servant for scribal matters, so that later everyone became convinced that he had apparently been born into the world completely finished, wearing a civil service uniform and with a bald spot on his head. In the Department, no one showed him any respect. The guards not only didn’t get up from their seats when he went by, they didn’t even look at him, as if an ordinary fly had flown through the anteroom. The supervisors treated him in a kind of coldly despotic manner. Some assistant desk head would just stick some documents under his nose without even saying, “Copy them,” or “Here’s a nice, interesting little job,” or something pleasant, as is the habit in genteel places of work. And he would take it, looking only at the document, not looking to see who had put it under his nose and whether that person had the right to do so. He would take it and immediately settle down to copy it.

  The young civil servants would laugh and make jokes at his expense, telling all sorts of stories they had made up about him, right in front of him; they would say that his landlady—an old woman seventy years of age—beat him, they would ask when their wedding was going to be, they would sprinkle bits of paper on his head, calling it snow. But Akaky Akakievich would not respond with a single word to this, as if there were no one standing before him. It didn’t even have an effect on his work: Amid all these annoyances he never made a single mistake in his writing. Only if the joke was too unbearable, when they would shove him under his arm, hindering him from doing his task, would he say: “Leave me alone, why do you offend me?” And something strange was contained in the words and in the voice in which they were uttered. In it one could hear something that inspired such compassion that one young man who had been recently appointed and who, following the example of the others, had permitted himself to laugh at him, suddenly stopped as if he had been pierced, and from that time it was as if everything had changed for him and appeared in a different form. A kind of unnatural force pushed him away from his comrades, who when he met them had appeared to be decent, urbane people. And for a long time afterward, in the middle of the happiest moments, a vision of the lowly civil servant with the bald spot on his forehead would rise before him, with his penetrating words: “Leave me alone, why do you offend me?”—and in those penetrating words other words rang out: “I am thy brother.” And the poor young man would cover his eyes with his hand, and many times in his life did he afterward shudder when he saw how much inhumanity there is in humanity, how much savage coarseness is hidden in refined, educated urbanity, and, my God! even in the person whom the world recognizes as noble and honorable…

  It would hardly be possible to find a person who lived so thoroughly in his job. It’s not enough to say he served zealously—no, he served with love. In that copying he had a vision of his own multifarious and pleasant world. Delight was expressed on his face; some of the letters were his favorites, and when he got to them he was beside himself: He would laugh, and wink, and help out with his lips, so that it seemed you could read on his face every letter his pen was tracing. If they had given him recompense commensurate with his zeal, then to his own amazement he might even have ended up as a state councillor; but as his witty comrades put it, he had served long enough to earn a badge in his buttonhole and a hemorrhoid in his backside. One could not, however, say that no attention had been paid to him. One director, who was a kind man and wished to reward him for his long service, ordered them to give him something a little more important than ordinary copying; namely, he was ordered to take an already finished case and create a memorandum to another office. All he had to do was change the titular heading and change a few verbs from first person to third. This caused him so much effort that he was covered in sweat, he wiped his brow, and he finally said: “No, you’d better give me something to copy.” From that time, they left him to copy forevermore. Outside of this copying, it seemed that nothing existed for him. He didn’t think about his clothing at all: his uniform was not green but a kind of reddish-floury color. Its collar was narrow and low, so that his neck, despite the fact that it was not long, seemed to be unusually long as it extended out of his collar, like the necks on those plaster bobble-head kittens that whole dozens of Russian foreigners carry on their heads.4 And something was always getting stuck to his uniform, either a piece of straw or a little thread; furthermore, as he walked along the street, he had a particular knack of getting under a window at the precise time when someone was throwing all kinds of trash out of it, and so he was eternally bearing away on his hat watermelon rinds and melon rinds and that kind of rubbish. Not once in his life did he pay any attention to what was being done and what was happening every day on the street, the kind of thing that a person of his own profession, a young civil servant, always looks at, extending the perceptiveness of his bold gaze to the point that he will even notice that the foot strap has come loose on the trousers worn by someone on the other side of the pavement—which always brings a sly grin to his face.

  But if Akaky Akakievich looked at anything, he saw on everything his own clean lines written out in his even handwriting, and only if a horse’s muzzle was placed on his shoulder and let a whole gust of wind blow from its nostrils onto his cheek, only then would he notice that he was not in the middle of a line but in the middle of the street. When he came home he would immediately sit down at the table, quickly slurp his cabbage soup and eat a piece of beef with onions without noticing any flavor at all, he would eat all this along with flies and anything else that God happened to send at that moment. When he noticed that his stomach was beginning to swell, he would get up from the table, take out a little bottle of ink, and copy documents that he had brought home. If he didn’t happen to have any, he would purposely make a copy for himself, for his own satisfaction, especially if the document was remarkable not for the beauty of the style but because of its being addressed to some new or important personage.

  Even at those hours when the gray St. Petersburg sky is growing completely dim and the whole population of civil servants has eaten their fill and had dinner in whatever way they can manage, in conformity with the salary they receive and their own whims—when they have all taken a rest after the departmental scraping of quill pens, the running around, their own and other people’s necessary tasks, and all those things that fidgety people assign themselves voluntarily to do beyond what is necessary—when the civil servants hurry to devote their remaining time to enjoyment: an energetic one rushes off to the theater; another one goes out on the street, designating this time for inspecting little hats; another goes to a party, to waste the evening giving compliments to a comely young woman, the star of the little circle of civil servants; another, and this is what happens most often, simply goes to see another civil servant of his own sort who lives on a fourth or third floor, in two small rooms with an entryway or a kitchen and a few pretensions to fashion, a lamp or some other little object that cost many sacrifices, denials of dinners and outings—in short, even at that time when all the civil servants disperse among the little apartments of their friends to play a game of Sturmwhist, slurping tea out of glasses along with kopeck biscuits, inhaling smoke from their long pipes, recounting while the cards are being dealt some bit of gossip that has come flying in from high society, the kind of gossip that a Russian person can never resist, no matter what his station, or even, when there is nothing to talk about, retelling the eternal anecdote about the Fortress governor to whom it was reported that the tail of the horse on Falconet’s monument had been chopped off—in short, even at that time when everyone was striving to entertain themselves—Akaky Akakievich did not indulge in any entertainment.5 No one could say that they had ever seen him at an evening party. After he had written to his heart’s content, he would lie down to sleep, smiling in advance
at the thought of the next day: What would God send him to copy tomorrow? Thus flowed by the peaceful life of a person who on a salary of four hundred knew how to be content with his lot, and it would have perhaps continued flowing to extreme old age, if there were not various calamities strewn about the life path not only of titular councillors, but even of privy, actual, court, and all other kinds of councillors, and even of those who neither give counsel nor receive it themselves.

  There is in St. Petersburg a powerful enemy of all those who receive a salary of four hundred a year or thereabouts. That enemy is none other than our freezing northern weather—although they do say, however, that it is very healthy. Just after eight o’clock in the morning, that is, precisely at the time when the streets are covered by people going to the Department, it begins to give such powerful and stinging flicks to all noses indiscriminately, that the poor civil servants absolutely do not know where to put them. At that time when the foreheads of even those occupying high posts are hurting from the frost and tears are coming to their eyes, the poor titular councillors are sometimes defenseless. Their entire salvation consists in running as fast as they can in their pitifully thin overcoats across five or six streets and then stamping their feet for a good long while in the doorman’s room until all their capabilities and talents for the execution of their duties get thawed out. For some time Akaky Akakievich had begun to feel that he was getting a particularly strong burn in his back and shoulder, despite the fact that he tried to run as fast as he could across the lawful space. Finally, he wondered whether there might not be some faults in his overcoat. When he inspected it thoroughly at home, he discovered that in two or three places, namely on the back and shoulders, it had become nothing but cheesecloth. The cloth had become so worn out that you could see through it, and the lining was shredded. The reader should know that Akaky Akakievich’s overcoat was another subject of the civil servants’ ridicule. They even deprived it of the noble name of overcoat and called it a housecoat. In fact, it was strangely constructed: its collar got smaller and smaller every year, because it served to sharpen up the other parts of the coat. This sharpening up did not display the skill of the tailor and turned out pouchy and shabby.

  When he saw what the problem was, Akaky Akakievich decided that he had to take the overcoat to Petrovich, a tailor who lived somewhere on the fourth floor up a back stairway, who despite having only one eye and being pockmarked all over his face had a rather successful business mending the pants and tailcoats of civil servants and all other sorts of people—when he was in a sober condition, needless to say, and was not nourishing some other enterprise in his head. We of course wouldn’t need to say much about this tailor, but since it’s been established that every character in a story has to be fully defined, we have no choice, let’s deal with Petrovich as well. At first, he was called simply Grigory and was a serf belonging to some nobleman. He started being called Petrovich from the time he received his manumission and began going on fairly serious drunken binges on every holiday, at first on the major ones, but later on all church holidays indiscriminately, whenever there was a little cross on the calendar. In this respect he was true to the customs of his grandfathers, and during arguments with his wife he would call her a worldly woman and a German. Since we’ve mentioned his wife, we also have to say a few words about her; but unfortunately not much was known about her, except perhaps that Petrovich had a wife, that she even wore a bonnet and not a kerchief, but it seems she could not boast of beauty. At least, only Guards soldiers would take a peep under her bonnet when they encountered her, then blink their mustaches and emit a peculiar vocal sound.

  As he climbed the stairway to Petrovich’s place, which, to do it justice, was all anointed with water and slops and permeated through and through by that spirituous smell that stings the eyes and that as everyone knows is inevitably present on the back stairways of all St. Petersburg buildings—as he climbed the stairway, Akaky Akakievich was already thinking about how he would make his request to Petrovich and was mentally resolving not to offer more than two rubles. The door was open because the mistress of the house, while cooking some fish, had filled the kitchen with so much smoke that you couldn’t even see the cockroaches. Akaky Akakievich passed through the kitchen, unnoticed even by the mistress of the house, and finally entered a room where he saw Petrovich sitting on a broad, unpainted wooden table with his legs tucked up under him like a Turkish pasha. His feet, as is the custom of tailors when they are sitting at their work, were naked. The first thing that struck the eye was his big toe, very well known to Akaky Akakievich, with its mutilated toenail, as thick and strong as a turtle’s shell. A hank of silk and threads was hanging around Petrovich’s neck, and he had some ragged garment in his lap. He had been trying for about three minutes to put a thread through the eye of a needle. He kept missing, and so he was very angry at the darkness and even at the thread itself, as he growled under his breath: “She won’t go in, the barbarian; you’ve worn me out, you rascal!”

  Akaky Akakievich was unhappy that he had come right at the moment that Petrovich was getting angry. He liked to order things from Petrovich when the latter had taken a bit of Dutch courage, or as his wife would put it, “he’s full of rotgut, the one-eyed devil.”6 In such a condition, Petrovich would usually be willing to come down on the price and be agreeable and would even bow and thank him every time. It’s true, his wife would come see him later, crying and saying that her husband had been drunk and that was why he had settled on too low a price, but all you had to do was throw in a ten-kopeck coin, and it was in the bag. Now, however, it seemed that Petrovich was in a sober condition, and so he was tough, disputatious, and ready to ask God knows what price. Akaky Akakievich realized this and was ready to beat a hasty retreat, as they say, but the business was already begun. Petrovich squinted at him very attentively with his single eye, and Akaky Akakievich involuntarily uttered: “Hello there, Petrovich!”

  “I wish you good health, sir,” Petrovich said and looked askance with his one eye at Akaky Akakievich’s hands, wishing to catch sight of the booty he was carrying.

  “So I’ve come to you, Petrovich, because, like…”

  You must know that Akaky Akakievich expressed himself for the most part in prepositions, adverbs, and, finally, in those particles that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever. If it was a very delicate matter, then he even had the habit of not ending his sentences at all, so that very often, he would begin a speech with the words: “This is, truly, quite something that, like…”—and then there would be nothing more, and he himself would forget, thinking that he had already said everything.

  “What is it?” Petrovich said and at the same time inspected with his single eye Akaky Akakievich’s whole uniform, beginning with the collar and ending with the sleeves, back, coattails, and buttonholes—which were all very familiar to him, because they were his own workmanship. Such is the habit of tailors: That is the first thing they will do when they meet you.

  “Well, here’s like, Petrovich… the overcoat, the cloth… here you see, everywhere in other places it’s quite strong, it’s just gotten a little dusty, and it seems as if it’s old, but it’s new, but see, just in that one place it’s a little, you know… on the back, and also here on one shoulder it’s worn through just a little bit, and here on the other shoulder just a little—you see, that’s all. And it’s not much work…”

  Petrovich took the housecoat, and after first laying it out on the table, he looked it over for a long time, shook his head, and reached to the windowsill for a round snuffbox with the portrait of some general on it, but we do not know which general, because the place where the face was had been poked through by a finger and then had a rectangular scrap of paper pasted on it.7 After taking some snuff, Petrovich spread the housecoat out on his arms and looked at it against the light, and again shook his head. Then he turned it with its lining up and again shook his head, again opened the lid with the general pasted over with paper, and after takin
g some snuff into his nose, he closed it, put the snuffbox away, and finally said: “No, it’s impossible to fix it: That’s some worn-out wardrobe!”