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Publication details

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Place: Basingstoke

Year: 1989

Pages: 64-82

Series: Studies in Russia and East Europe

ISBN (Hardback): 9781349196289

Full citation:

Ann Shukman, "Gogol's the nose or the devil in the works", in: Nikolay Gogol, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

If The Nose had been written in French or English, or if, on the other hand, post-structuralism had taken root in Moscow and Leningrad, Gogol's tale might well have become a proof text for deconstructive exegesis. Constructed on a pun, replete with paradoxes, illogicalities, games and mystifications with the reader, the tale is "unreadable" in the sense that it resists any single definitive reading or "univocal" meaning; and indeed, to use deconstructionist terms, it might be argued that it contains within itself, "jostling irreconcilably with one another, both logocentric metaphysics and nihilism".1 Besides, the central and compounded "absurdity" of the tale — the transformation of Kovalyov's free-roaming nose into the state counsellor Nose, who is then re-transformed back into Kovalyov's nose — not only defies logic and probability, but is also impossible to envisage in the mind's eye; it is a play with words, a paronomasia, a textual joke, as the more linguistically orientated critics have noted. For Roman Jakobson, for instance, the story demonstrated the purely verbal nature of the "realized oxymoron", a figure which has meaning but no object: "Such is Gogol's "Nose" which Kovalyov recognises as a nose even though it shrugs its shoulders, wears full uniform and so on."2 Bakhtin too, commenting on Gogol, noted aphoristically that "the word engenders the thing".3

Cited authors

Publication details

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Place: Basingstoke

Year: 1989

Pages: 64-82

Series: Studies in Russia and East Europe

ISBN (Hardback): 9781349196289

Full citation:

Ann Shukman, "Gogol's the nose or the devil in the works", in: Nikolay Gogol, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989