The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol

21. The phrase “experiments in the operation of magnetism” probably refers to activities inspired by the theories of Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), who developed a method for treating illness based on internal magnetic forces that he called “animal magnetism.” The phrase “dancing chairs” refers to rumors about spontaneously moving furniture in the home of an official of the Imperial Stables (from which Stables Street took its name), noted by Alexander Pushkin in his diary (and by other sources) in 1833.

  22. 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. During his stay in St. Petersburg he lived in the Tauride Palace, with its extensive adjacent gardens.

  23. It should be noted that the title of the story in Russian, “Nos,” when read backward becomes “Son,” which means “dream.”

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

  Rome

  1. Albano (now Albano Laziale) is an ancient town on Lake Albano, about 14 miles from Rome.

  2. Like Albano, Castel Gandolfo is in the Alban Hills, on Lake Albano. The word minente (derived from eminente) refers to commoners who are sufficiently well off to dress in a showy and colorful manner. Although Gogol’s minenti are apparently men, the word more often refers to women. Frascati is another town in the Alban Hills near Albano.

  3. Gogol’s references in this story reflect his keen interest in the artistic treasures that can be viewed in Rome. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), called Il Guercino (“the Squinter”), was born in Cento but was active in Rome in 1621–1623, where he painted the important fresco Aurora in the Villa Ludovisi. Annibale Caracci (1560–1609) and his brother Agostino (1557–1602) were Bolognese artists who painted magnificent frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Their cousin Ludovico (1555–1619) was a major influence on Guercino. Gogol brought home to Russia a copy of a depiction of the Savior by Annibale Caracci, which is now in a museum in Gogol’s birthplace.

  4. Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) was a scholar and cardinal who helped to codify Italian as a literary language based on the Tuscan dialect. His letters are considered masterpieces of Latin style. Giovanni della Casa (1503–1556) was a Florentine poet and prose writer, known for his posthumously published treatise on polite behavior, Il Galateo overo de’ costumi (1558). Olio di ricino is castor oil, used since ancient times as a laxative.

  5. The Via del Corso is the major access into Rome from the northern city gate, the Porta del Popolo. It was used as a racetrack during the Roman Carnival (the backdrop for the last part of the story). The Villa Borghese Pinciana is a seventeenth-century villa near the Porta del Popolo, famous for its gardens and art collection.

  6. The “unbridled French muse” refers to the works of Victor Hugo and other French Romantic writers of the 1830s.

  7. The July Revolution of 1830 in France deposed the Bourbon king Charles X and brought Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, to the throne in a constitutional monarchy. After the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, Italy was largely under the control of the Austrian Empire. There was a series of insurrections in 1830 in various parts of what is now Italy.

  8. The omnibus was a large horse-drawn carriage on springs that could carry about fifteen to twenty passengers. Paris had regular omnibus service beginning in 1828. Paris was known for its glass-ceilinged, artificially illuminated arcades for pedestrian shopping. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Galerie d’Orléans at the Palais Royal, built 1828–1830. The landmarks of Paris that are foregrounded here are key signs of the city as the vanguard of progress and modernity.

  9. Gogol uses the word bottega to refer to a servant in an osteria. Modern Italian dictionaries define bottega as “shop.” But in Karl Baedeker, Italy. Handbook for Travelers, we find, “The waiter of a restaurant is called cameriere, that of an osteria bottega” (Vol. 2: Central Italy and Rome [Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1875], 82). The Diario di Roma was founded in 1714; beginning in 1814 it was the official gazette of the Papal States but also provided news on literature and culture. Il Pirata (not Pirato, as Gogol has it) was a twice-weekly journal published in Milan from 1835 to 1891. It covered literature, art, and theater. Thermopylae was a battle between Persians and Greeks in 480 BCE. Darius I the Great (550–486 BCE) was one of the most powerful Persian kings.

  10. “The Chambers” refers to the French bicameral legislature. In 1830–1848 these were the Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies.

  11. I have not been able to determine what “crocodiles” refers to.

  12. French vaudeville was a comic genre that incorporated song, dance, and satirical verses. Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) was a Venetian dramatist, the author of classic comedies.

  13. Gogol’s quotation of this verse attributed to Count Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803) is inaccurate. The verse actually reads: “Tutto fanno, e nulla sanno, / Tutto sanno, e nulla fanno; / Gira, volta, è son Francesi, / Più li pesi, men ti danno” (They do everything, they know nothing, they know everything, they do nothing; the French are scatterbrains, the more you weigh out to them, the less they give you for it).

  14. The editors of PSS 2009 point out that Gogol had a similar idea about the relationship between the French and the Slavs. In an untitled and unpublished introduction from the 1840s to a Russian translation of Prosper Mérimée, Gogol wrote, “To feel and divine the Slavic spirit is too much and almost impossible for a Frenchman. By their nature these two nations are unable to harmonize in character.”

  15. Gogol’s friend A. O. Smirnova recalled that he arranged so that all of their walks ended at St. Peter’s Basilica and that he told her he had spent many hours lying on the dome’s interior cornice at the base of its drum, marveling at the genius of Michelangelo. In a way, Gogol had moved from one “city of St. Peter” to another in his move from St. Petersburg to Rome, and his engagement with the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica has a deeper significance than mere touristic interest.

  16. The Ponte Molle is a bridge over the Tiber north of Rome. The Piazza del Popolo is a major square adjacent to the northern gate into Rome, the Porta del Popolo. It marks the beginning of the Via del Corso, mentioned earlier in the story and also toward the end. Monte Pincio or the Pincian Hill is in the northeast part of Rome and is the site of the Villa Borghese, mentioned earlier in the story.

  17. The Palazzo Ruspoli is a sixteenth-century palace on the Via del Corso. The oldest part of the Palazzo Colonna in central Rome dates to the thirteenth century. The Palazzo Sciarra is a sixteenth-century palace on the Via del Corso. The Palazzo Doria Pamphilj is a seventeenth-century palace on the Via del Corso.

  18. Donato Bramante (1444–1514) was the original architect for the new St. Peter’s Basilica commissioned by Pope Julius II.

  19. The phrase “how he could maintain con onore i doveri di marito” means “how he could maintain with honor the duties of a husband,” in other words, his conjugal duties.

  20. “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.”

  21. The term “Middle Ages” as Gogol uses it here seems to refer to the period now called the Renaissance, a term which was coined in its present sense by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1855, after Gogol’s death.

  22. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was an architect and sculptor known for the dramatic inventiveness of his Baroque style.

  23. Like Bernini, Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) was an exponent of the Roman Baroque style of architecture. Several of the other artists mentioned here are associated with St. Peter’s Basilica. “Sangallo” may refer to the architects Giuliano da Sangallo (1445–1516), Antonio da Sangallo the Elder (1453–1534), o
r Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484–1546), the last of whom helped to design and construct St. Peter’s Basilica. Giacomo della Porta (1532–1602) completed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, in collaboration with Domenico Fontana (1543–1607). Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573) also worked on St. Peter’s Basilica.

  24. Gogol had spoken about the pettiness of the nineteenth century in his essay “Sculpture, Painting, and Music” (1834), in the collection Arabesques, referring to “all the fragmentation of whims and amusements that our nineteenth century racks its brains over.”

  25. The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin is an offshoot of the Franciscans. Franciscans wear brown robes.

  26. The term “cinquecento” refers to the sixteenth century, and by extension the Italian art of that century. I have not found any sources attesting to a garment by this name.

  27. Gogol is describing the Roman Campagna, the low-lying area surrounding Rome. The area was associated both with the spread of disease (malaria) and with the highly influential landscape painting of Claude Lorrain (Gellée, 1604/5–1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). Gogol’s descriptions here seem to be attempting to accomplish in words what these painters created in visual art.

  28. The eastern facade of St. John Lateran is topped by fifteen large statues, including Jesus, John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist.

  29. The editors of PSS 2009 note that P. V. Annenkov and F. I. Iordan both recount in their memoirs that they spent an evening with Gogol at a villa in Albano and admired a marvelous sunset in the Roman Campagna. This evening followed soon after the death of their acquaintance, the young architect M. A. Tomarinsky, from a rapidly progressing fever in the spring of 1841.

  30. The phrase “a whole city of kingly merchants” refers to Venice, which became a center of world trade in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In an 1833 essay on the teaching of history, Gogol called it “this queen of the seas, this marvelous republic, with such an intricate and unusually organized government.”

  31. This refers to Christopher Columbus. In the essay on history, Gogol wrote that Columbus killed the trade of Venice by discovering the New World.

  32. Quirites was an ancient name for the citizens of Rome.

  33. Genzano is another town in the Alban Hills. Since 1778 it has had a June festival called Infiorata, in which one of its streets is carpeted with flowers woven into intricate designs. Gogol described the festival in a letter to his sisters in 1838.

  34. Memoirists of the nineteenth century offer similar descriptions of the elaborate decorations in the shops of the pizzicaroli in Rome on Easter Saturday, as the Lenten fast is about to end. For example: “In one shop we saw St. Paul irradiated by a glory of sausages; and in another the ill-boding bird of St. Peter, hung up with the apostle it had warned in vain; Madonnas curiously carved in butter, and Bambinos in lard, warmed the devotion of the inward man; and every eatable of plastic consistence, or of malleable form, was pressed into the service of architectural decoration and symbolic piety.” “Italy,” in Atheneum, or Spirit of the English Magazines, vol. 10, 1821, p. 21.

  35. The Greek Anthology was a collection of mostly brief poems from the classical and Byzantine periods, often of a sensual nature.

  36. The Signoria was the governing body of the city.

  37. Throwing flour to mark the end of Carnival and beginning of Lent is an ancient tradition. Harlequin and Columbine are characters in the Commedia dell’arte, a form of semi-improvisatory theater that began in Italy in the sixteenth century. In a letter from Rome of February 2, 1838, to A. S. Danilevsky, Gogol describes the Roman Carnival: “Now is the time of Carnival: Rome is going on an all-out spree. The Carnival is an amazing phenomenon in Italy, and especially in Rome—absolutely everyone is out on the street, everyone is in masks. The person who has no possibility of getting dressed up in costume turns his sheepskin coat inside out or smears his mug with soot. Whole trees and flower gardens ride along the streets, often a cart will drag by all covered in leaves and garlands, its wheels decorated with leaves and branches [….] The Corso is covered with snow from the flour that has been thrown. I heard about the confetti, I never realized it could be so good. Just imagine, you can pour out a whole bag of flour into the face of the prettiest woman, even if she is a Borghese, and she won’t get angry but will pay you back in kind. The fops and gentlemen spend several hundred scudi apiece on flour alone. [….] It’s an amazing freedom, which would probably send you into raptures. You can speak and give flowers to decidedly any woman you wish. You can even get into the carriage and sit down among them. [….] All the beautiful women of Rome have now floated to the surface, there is such a multitude of them now, and God only knows where they came from. I had never encountered them before; they are all strangers” (Academy PSS 11: 122).

  38. Gogol’s footnote: “In Italian poetry there is a type of poem known as a sonnet with a tail (con la coda)—when there isn’t enough room in the poem for the idea, and it carries after it an addition that is often longer than the sonnet itself.”

  39. Gogol’s footnote: “The Romans call everyone who does not live in Rome foreigners (forestieri), even if they live only ten miles from the city.”

  40. The Ave Maria (Hail Mary) is part of the Angelus devotion, which would be recited in the morning, at noon, and in the evening.

  41. Luke 11:33 (King James Version): “No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light.”

  42. “Siora” and “Sior” are colloquial versions of Signora and Signor, probably more characteristic of northern Italy than of Rome.

  43. I have taken the liberty of restoring a censored passage here. The passage beginning “There were models” and ending with “make a confession about it” was censored from the original 1842 publication in the journal Moskvitianin and was not restored in subsequent publications (A. S. Bodrova, “…Popravki byli vazhnye…”: K istorii teksta povesti N. V. Gogolia ‘Rim,’ ” in Gogol’: Materialy i issledovaniia [Moscow, 2009], no. 2, p. 10).

  44. The Church of St. Ignatius Loyola is a seventeenth-century church in the center of Rome. Tre Ladroni means “three bandits.” Via della Stamperia is the Street of the Printers, near the Trevi Fountain. The Trinità dei Monti church is situated at the top of the Spanish Steps, leading down to the Piazza di Spagna. For most of his time in Rome, Gogol lived nearby, on the present-day Via Sistina.

  45. As a result of a papal bull of 1555, Jews were required to live in the walled section of the city known as the Ghetto. This restriction was maintained, with brief interruptions, until the mid-nineteenth century.

  46. The Trastevere (“across the Tiber”) neighborhood is on the west side of the Tiber. The church of San Pietro in Montorio is on the southwest outskirts of Rome.

  47. The “Antonino column” refers to the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which is crowned by a bronze statue of St. Paul.

  48. The Carnival in Rome culminated in races by riderless horses along the Via del Corso.

  The Overcoat

  1. Titular councillor is rank 9 in the Table of Ranks (see frontmatter). Since promotion to rank 8 conferred hereditary nobility, many civil servants remained “stuck” at rank 9. Irina Reyfman argues that “Akaky’s service abilities are so obviously deficient that his having this rank is simply not plausible,” and that for a “lowly scribe” the rank of collegiate registrar (rank 14) would be more appropriate (How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016], 113).

  2. The word for “brother-in-law” used here means “wife’s brother,” so the fact that lumping him together with the other Bashmachkins makes no sense is particularly obvious.

  3. Russian Orthodox believers choose their children’s names from the Calendar of Saints. The person would celebrate his or her “name day” on the day dedicated to the saint for which he or she was named. Most of the names listed h
ere are the names of actual saints. But none of them is a commonly used Russian name, and they all (including Akaky) sound outlandish and funny to a Russian ear. The name Akaky is from the Greek name Akakios (Latin Acacius) and is the name of several saints. Many scholars, beginning with F. C. Driessen, have drawn parallels between Akaky’s story and the hagiographical tradition. (Driessen, Gogol as a Short-Story Writer [The Hague: Mouton, 1965], 182–214.) Simon Karlinsky has pointed out that the name Akaky derives from a Greek word meaning “immaculate” or “without blemish,” but also sounds like the Russian word okakat’, “to cover with excrement.” (The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976], 137.)

  4. The phrase “Russian foreigners” is in the original. Street peddlers would carry trays with their goods on their heads.

  5. Sturmwhist is a German variant of the English trick-taking card game whist. “Fortress governor” refers to the governor of the Fortress of Sts. Peter and Paul. “Falconet’s monument” refers to the “Bronze Horseman,” the equestrian statue erected in 1782 in the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, dedicated to Peter I by Catherine II and created by Étienne Maurice Falconet (1716–1791).

  6. The word “devil” is mentioned numerous times in association with the tailor Petrovich. Moreover, his having one eye, and his toenail, “as thick and strong as a turtle’s shell,” evoke the Slavic tradition of the one-eyed devil and the devil as lame or hoofed.

  7. The critic Dmitry Chizhevsky writes, “The only thing that Akaky Akakievich sees at the moment when the matter of a new overcoat is being decided, is precisely this faceless general, and the Devil is faceless. As someone who was well read in religious literature, as a connoisseur and collector of folklore materials—popular songs and legends—Gogol of course knew about the Christian and folk tradition that the Devil is faceless.” (“About Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974], 320.)