Gogol’s “The Nose”: Between Linguistic Indecency and Religious Blasphemy

Abstract

Focused on Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist tale, “The Nose” (1835), this article is an investigation into the concealed representation of suppressed and marginalized libertine and anti-religious discourses in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The author identifies overlooked idiomatic phraseology, forgotten specificities of the Imperial hierarchy (the Table of Ranks), and allusions to religious customs and Christian rituals that would have been apparent to Gogol’s readers and shows how some were camouflaged to escape censorship in successive drafts of the work. The research builds on the approaches to Gogol’s language, imagery and plot developed earlier by the Russian Formalists, Tartu-Moscow semioticians, and a few other scholars, who revealed the latent obscenity of Gogol’s “rhinology” and the sacrilegious meaning of the tale’s very specific chronotope. The previous scholars’ observations are substantially supplemented by original findings. An integrated analysis of these aspects in their mutual relationship is required to understand what the telling details of the story reveal about Gogol’s religious and psychological crisis of the mid-1830s and to demonstrate how he aggregated indecent Shandyism, social satire, and religious blasphemy into a single quasi-oneiric narrative.

Keywords

• The Nose (tale)
• Gogol
• religious crisis
• sacrilege
• blasphemy
• linguistic indecency