The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol

  2. The exhortation by the young women is given in Ukrainian in the original text. Ukrainian words are scattered throughout the story. Gogol provided a glossary to the original edition of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka of “words in this book that are not comprehensible to everyone.”

  3. “Fools” is a popular card game (similar to the Russian game durak) based on getting rid of all the cards in one’s hand; the player left with cards is the “fool.” In a letter to his mother of May 22, 1829 (OS), Gogol asked her to send him descriptions of various Ukrainian card games, as well as stories told by the peasants about adventures in which “spirits and demons [nechistye, lit. the unclean ones]” take part (Academy PSS 10: 144).

  4. This story is based on a pun: The word for “letter” in the title, gramota, also means “literacy.” Thus, the discussion of how many literate people could be found in Baturyn is directly related to the “letter” that drives the plot. Baturyn was in the province of Little Russia, on the Seym River (present-day northern Ukraine). Orthodox clergy could marry and have children.

  5. There is no simple definition for the term “Cossack.” It encompasses groups of people that differ based on geography and history. Although Cossacks began mainly as serfs who ran away and sought their freedom in the steppes, the Cossacks of eighteenth-century Ukraine were a fairly well defined and hierarchical social group, organized as a Hetman state that existed from 1648 to 1782 and combined elements of republicanism and monarchism. The empress is probably Catherine II (ruled 1762–1796).

  6. Konotop is about thirty kilometers southeast of Baturyn.

  7. Gogol’s glossary defines chumaks as “cart drivers who travel to Crimea for salt and fish.” I have translated the word moskal’ as “Rooskie,” as it has a pejorative sense for Ukrainians, implying laziness and cunning.

  8. The Zaporozhian Sich was a semiautonomous group of Cossacks living beyond the rapids of the Dnieper River. Fears of their growing independence led Catherine II to disband the Zaporozhian Sich by a decree of 1775. The appearance and clothing of the Zaporozhian conform to the costume of this character in the Ukrainian itinerant puppet theater or “nativity play,” which combined religious and secular motifs. Gogol’s indebtedness to the Ukrainian puppet theater is elucidated by V. V. Gippius, Gogol, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989). The bandura is a string instrument closely associated with Ukrainian folk music. At this period it was similar to the lute.

  9. The Zaporozhian’s request that his companions stay awake with him, as well as their failure to do so, evoke Christ’s request to his disciples at Gethsemane on the night of his arrest and their failure to stay awake as he prays.

  10. The traditional Ukrainian Cossack hairstyle was a long lock of hair growing out of an otherwise closely shaved head.

  11. The “dove dance” and gopak are Ukrainian folk dances.

  12. According to superstition, if you sneeze repeatedly, it means that someone is speaking disparagingly about you.

  13. The trepak (or tropak) is a Ukrainian and Russian folk dance.

  14. The Orthodox calendar includes many fasts, during which foods such as meat, fish, eggs, and dairy (in various combinations) have to be avoided.

  15. Granddad’s hostility to Catholicism is conditioned not only by his Orthodox faith but also by the Cossack’s attitude to his former Roman Catholic Polish-Lithuanian overlords.

  Viy

  1. Gogol’s footnote to the title: “Viy is the colossal creation of the common folk’s imagination. The Little Russians use this name for the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids on his eyes reach all the way to the ground. This whole story is a folk legend. I did not want to change anything about it, so I am narrating it in almost the same simple form in which I heard it.” Most scholars believe that there is no Slavic folklore source for the monster Viy, although the editors of PSS 2009 consider this an open question.

  2. The Brotherhood Monastery in Kyiv was founded in 1588; the attached school was founded in 1615. The names of the class years are based on the main disciplines studied in those years (first year, Greek and Latin grammar; second year, rhetoric; third year, philosophy; and fourth year, theology). Gogol makes a distinction between the bursaks, the charity-supported students of the bursa, who live in the dormitory, and the seminarists, who rent private apartments.

  3. Gogol’s early work is deeply indebted to the Ukrainian itinerant puppet theater or “nativity play,” a folk tradition that combined religious and secular motifs. The influence on Gogol of the Ukrainian puppet theater is elucidated by V. V. Gippius, Gogol, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989). The Kyiv bell tower is that of the Kyivo-Pechers’ka Lavra or the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves, erected 1731–1745 (96.5 meters in height).

  4. Khalyava means “boot top” and is also a nickname for a freeloader. The name “Khoma” is a version of Thomas. “Brut” alludes to Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42 BCE), one of the assassins of Julius Caesar. “Tiberius” alludes to the Roman emperor who succeeded Augustus. “Gorobets” means “sparrow.”

  5. The trepak (or tropak) is a Ukrainian and Russian folk dance.

  6. The traditional Ukrainian Cossack hairstyle was a long lock of hair growing out of an otherwise closely shaved head.

  7. A glossary by Gogol in his earlier collection, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, defines chumaks as “cart drivers who travel to Crimea for salt and fish.”

  8. This appears to be St. Peter’s Fast (or the Apostles’ Fast), which would begin at the end of May or beginning of June and end in late June (OS). An observant Orthodox person would abstain from sex during fast time.

  9. There is no simple definition for the term “Cossack.” It encompasses groups of people that differ based on geography and history. Although Cossacks began mainly as serfs who ran away and sought their freedom in the steppes, the Cossacks of eighteenth-century Ukraine were a fairly well-defined and hierarchical social group, organized as a Hetman state that existed from 1648 to 1782 and combined elements of republicanism and monarchism.

  10. The Slavic bathhouse ritual involves whipping with young birch branches to stimulate the circulation.

  11. I have chosen to keep the term pannochka, because it has a kind of incantatory power in the story. As a Polish-Ukrainian term for the unmarried daughter of a lord, it would have an exotic sound for a Russian reader.

  12. The bare hill evokes both Golgotha/Calvary, translated in the Gospels as “the place of the skull,” where according to legend Jesus was crucified, and the “bald hill” that is the location of witches’ sabbaths in East Slavic folklore.

  13. Again, sex would be forbidden during Holy Week, the greatest fast of the Christian year.

  14. In the story as published in Gogol’s lifetime in Mirgorod and his 1842 Collected Works, this phrase reads, “a funeral song,” not “a song about an oppressed people.” This change to the manuscript version of the story was apparently dictated by the censor. Although the phrase might refer to the Ukrainian people, it might also refer to the November Uprising of 1830–1831 in Poland. (Taras Koznarsky, personal communication reported in Robert Romanchuk, “Mother Tongue: Gogol’ ’s Pannochka, Pogorel’skii’s Monastyrka, and the Economy of Russian in the Little Russian Gothic,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 62, no. 2 [2018]: 272–92, 276n10.)

  15. The nickname kovtun (hair-mat) refers to “Polish plait,” which is either a disorder of the hair leading to matting or a hairstyle in which the mats are intentionally created by liquid or wax, a practice thought to alleviate illness.

  16. The term translated here as “best friend” is kum, which strictly refers to the godfather of one’s child, or the father of one’s godchild, but can also be used more loosely to mean a close friend.

  17. Sheptun was a term for a folk healer, derived from the word for “to whisper.”

  18. In this paragraph, Gogol switches from using the masculine pronoun, as is appropriate for the w
ord trup (corpse), and the feminine pronoun, even though the noun pannochka does not appear. I have tried to preserve the strangeness of this shift. (In 1842, when preparing to publish a four-volume collection of his works, Gogol reworked the original 1835 version of this story. The 1835 version of this passage includes the word mertvaia [dead woman], which has been omitted in the 1842 version, thus apparently leading to the discrepancy in pronouns.)

  19. In the 1835 version of the story, a multitude of gnomes breaks into the church on the second night, including “a strange creature in the form of a regular pyramid covered with slime,” topped by a “long tongue that kept sticking out ceaselessly and bending in all directions,” a cockroach the size of an elephant, and other delicious horrors (Academy PSS 2: 574–76).

  20. Khoma uses a verb that refers to bringing animals together for copulation.

  21. The 1835 version of the story includes some more colorful monsters, including a yellow body with a black skeleton on the outside and “something as long and thin as a stick, consisting entirely of eyes and eyelashes” (Academy PSS 2: 583).

  22. The 1835 version of the story ends here.

  The Portrait

  1. The Shchukin Market stalls in St. Petersburg were a center for the sale of used books and secondhand paintings.

  2. Khosrow Mirza (1813–1875) was a Persian prince, the grandson of the shah, who was sent as the head of a diplomatic mission to the court of Nicholas I to apologize for the murder of Russia’s ambassador to Persia, the poet Alexander Griboedov, in January 1829. Khosrow Mirza made a grand entrance to St. Petersburg in August 1829 and stayed for more than two months, becoming a media sensation. His portrait was widely circulated. The “pictures that attest to the native talent of the Russian” are lubki, cheap woodcuts and engravings, often brightly colored and combining images with texts, depicting fairy tales, biblical stories, and popular tales. Miliktrisa Kirbitievna is a character in the fairy tale Bova Korolevich, which dates to the sixteenth century and was widely illustrated in lubki.

  3. Yeruslan Lazarevich is the hero of a fairytale that was immensely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and served as a source for Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820). The Glutton-Drunkard was another popular woodcut, which depicted a gigantic glutton being served by tiny attendants, and was probably based on French depictions of Louis XVI as Rabelais’s Gargantua. Foma and Yeryoma were the comic heroes of tales about two brothers distin­guished by their foolishness and absurdity.

  4. Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) was a Flemish painter, a student of Peter Paul Rubens. In Gogol’s time his name would be associated with the summit of the portraitist’s art.

  5. The Fifteenth Line of Vasilievsky Island was close to the Academy of Fine Arts and was thus a favorite place for artists to live.

  6. A droshky is a light, open, four-wheeled cart.

  7. The Petersburg Side (now Petrograd Side) is a neighborhood in St. Petersburg consisting of four islands. It was originally a central part of the city but had become peripheral by the end of the eighteenth century. Kolomna was another neighborhood inhabited by petty civil servants as well as artists and actors.

  8. Gostiny Dvor in St. Petersburg was one of the first shopping arcades in the world, built in the eighteenth century.

  9. Madame Sichler owned dress shops in St. Petersburg. Pushkin’s wife Natalia Nikolaevna Pushkina ordered dresses from her.

  10. It is fairly clear from the original text that “yet another place” is a brothel.

  11. Psyche, whose name means “soul” in Greek, is the heroine of the tale of Cupid and Psyche told in The Golden Ass by Apuleius.

  12. The basilisk is a legendary serpent with a lethal gaze, most famously described in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.

  13. Titular councillor is rank 9 in the Table of Ranks (see frontmatter). Because promotion to rank 8 conferred hereditary nobility, many civil servants remained “stuck” at rank 9.

  14. Russia was at war with Turkey in 1787–1791, 1806–1812, and 1828–1829. The dating of the action of the story is not clear.

  15. The name Grigory comes from the Greek meaning “watchful, alert.”

  Nevsky Avenue

  1. The frock coat came into fashion in Russia in the early nineteenth century and was originally an outer garment. It differed from the tailcoat in having a skirt all around the base and a higher closure. Over time it became shorter and developed into the modern suit jacket. The editors of PSS Mann note that Gogol himself was twenty-five years old at the time he wrote “Nevsky Avenue.” Gogol had a personal interest in stylish clothing. While still in school in Nizhyn, he wrote to his friend G. I. Vysotsky in St. Petersburg, asking him to have a tailcoat made for him by the best tailor: “Please write me what kind of fashionable fabrics you have for waistcoats, for trousers…. I would really like to have a dark-blue one with metallic buttons made for myself” (letter of June 26, 1827, OS, Academy PSS 10: 102).

  2. The streets listed here are in central St. Petersburg. Gogol lived on Morskaya and Meshchanskaya Streets at various times. A droshky is a light two-seat open carriage on springs.

  3. The Petersburg Side and Vyborg District were on the northern outskirts of St. Petersburg, while the Peski area was in central St. Petersburg and the Moscow Turnpike was to the south.

  4. Gogol wrote to his mother that there were many outdoor amusements in St. Petersburg, but that they were “unbearable” (April 30, 1829, OS, Academy PSS 10: 140).

  5. In Greek mythology, Ganymede was a beautiful Trojan youth who was borne away by the gods to become the cupbearer on Olympus.

  6. The Catherine Canal (now Griboedov Canal) was a receptacle for sewage, so Gogol’s reference to its purity is ironic. Gogol lived on the Catherine Canal when he arrived in St. Petersburg.

  7. Gogol wrote to his mother about people on the streets of St. Petersburg who are “so occupied with their thoughts that as you come even with them you hear them cursing and talking to themselves, sometimes seasoning it with bodily movements and waving of their arms” (April 30, 1829, OS, Academy PSS 10: 139).

  8. The gilded, seventy-two-meter spire on the Admiralty Building at the western end of Nevsky Avenue is one of the major landmarks in St. Petersburg.

  9. See the Table of Ranks in the frontmatter. See also the interesting discussion by Irina Reyfman in her How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 104–7.

  10. The “prints that don’t dare to show themselves in broad daylight” also make an appearance in “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.”

  11. Perugino is Pietro Vannucci (ca. 1446 to 1452–1523), Italian Renaissance painter and teacher of Raphael. There are various hypotheses as to the specific painting referred to here, as there is no painting by Perugino called “Bianca.”

  12. The word translated here as “setting,” oklad, refers to the metal frame of an icon. This harmonizes with Piskaryov’s vision of the woman as a divinity “who seemed to have flown down from heaven right onto Nevsky Avenue.” Gogol wrote in similar terms to his mother about a (perhaps fictional) woman he had met in St. Petersburg (July 24, 1829, OS, Academy PSS 10: 147–48).

  13. In a letter to his mother from St. Petersburg, Gogol described the building he was living in: “The building in which I abide contains two tailors, one marchande de modes, a shoemaker, a stocking manufacturer, someone who glues broken crockery back together, a decatizer and dyer, a pastry shop, a hardware store, a warehouse for storing winter clothes, a tobacco shop, and finally a licensed midwife. Naturally, this building is entirely plastered with golden signboards” (letter of April 30, 1829, OS, Academy PSS 10: 139–40). A “decatizer” treats outerwear to make it water-resistant.

  14. In the court Table of Ranks, gentleman of the bedchamber was rank 5, a step below chamberlain (rank 4). This position was usually held by young aristocrats in the civil service. See the civil service Table of Ranks in the frontmatter.

 
15. The Persian refers to himself with feminine grammatical forms. This is a common mistake made by nonnative speakers of Russian and other Slavic languages, but it may also be an echo of the androgynous nature of the brothel as the narrator describes it earlier in the story, “where woman, that beauty of the world, the crown of creation, has been turned into a strange, ambiguous being, where together with the purity of her soul she has been deprived of everything feminine, has revoltingly adopted the manners and insolence of a man, and has ceased to be that weak, splendid being who is so different from us.”

  16. In the nineteenth century there was a fashion for jewelry made from human hair, often combined with precious metals and stones.

  17. The Orthodox Church forbade all funeral rites to people who had committed suicide. Okhta was on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.

  18. Hired mourners were often disabled veterans.

  19. The imperfect taste of the officer class is demonstrated by their lumping Alexander Pushkin, probably Russia’s greatest writer, together with the mediocre journalists Faddei Bulgarin (1789–1859) and N. I. Grech (1787–1867) and the writer of potboilers A. A. Orlov (1791–1840).

  20. The popular farces on themes from peasant life, Filatka and the Children by P. I. Grigoriev Sr., and Filatka and Miroshka the Rivals; or, Four Suitors for One Girl by P. G. Grigoriev Jr., were staged in the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1831.

  21. Members of the merchant class often wore beards, which were forbidden for men in the civil service. In his play Marriage (written 1833–1835, published 1842), Gogol describes the efforts of a merchant’s daughter to marry outside her class.