Gogol: The Nose

Gogol was just 24 when he started to write one of his most brilliant masterpieces, The Nose. He completed it in 1835 but the editors of the ‘Moscow Observer’ refused to publish it, describing it as ‘filthy’. The Nose thus first appeared in Pushkin’s journal, ‘The Contemporary’, in 1836. It is Gogol’s most remarkable exercise in the genre of the absurd and indeed is considered seminal for the development of the genre in the 20th century. It is no doubt the measure of Gogol’s achievement that the bizarre adventures of the Nose in the guise of a civil servant still have the power to baffle the critics of today.