The Nose and Other Stories

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The Nose and Other Stories Page 37

by Nikolai Gogol


  8. “Silver appliqué” refers to plated silver.

  9. The comparison of the overcoat to a “pleasant female life companion” is strengthened in the original text by the fact that the word used for overcoat, shinel’, is of feminine gender and has feminine pronouns and adjectives used with it.

  10. The word for “calm,” pokoinyi, can also be translated as “deceased,” thus adding to the strange image of Akaky’s heart only now beginning to beat.

  11. The editors of PSS 2009 point out that in his notebooks for September 1841, Gogol described markets in St. Petersburg at which cats were sold for fur, with gray cats being the most desirable, presumably because they could be “mistaken for marten.”

  12. The expression translated here as “significant personage” is znachitel’noe litso in Russian. The word litso can mean “personage,” which is clearly the primary meaning here, but it also means “face.” The significance of the human face as a representation of the whole personality is an important theme in Gogol’s works (most notably “The Nose”), but there is no English word that can convey this secondary meaning in the context of “The Overcoat.”

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