Two short satiric stories of Gogol abut the XIX. century Russia. ( )

I managed somehow to review this on the children's version of the story written by another author. I had not realized that until it was pointed out to me today and I cannot now move the review to this edition, so just putting a link here in case anyone might be interested, but also so that I don't wonder why I didn't review this one.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3542254148?comment=238305766#comment_23830... ( )

Two short stories from the satirical absurdist Gogol. In the first, a Collegiate Assessor who refers to himself self-importantly, as The Major, wakened up one morning to find his nose is missing. His social pretensions prevent him from investigating openly with the fear of being ridiculed. The nose has been seen around town and eventually apprehended boarding a train. Funny, and strange in a Kafkaesque way. I am left wondering about possible analogies.

The second story The Carriage involves the potential sale of a carriage discussed at the opening of a bacchanalian evening when the seller, ended up in a drunken stupor. When the buyer shows up next day with a troop of fellow officers expecting another night of carousing they find the seller "not at home" while in fact he is hiding and recovering from the night before.

This book is one of Penguin's Little Black Classics series. ( )

A pair of charmingly strange stories, with a larger dash of humour than I expected. A worthwhile short read. ( )

The barber Ivan Yakovlevich has a terrible shock one morning when, tearing open a breakfast roll, he finds a nose within. Even worse, he recognises it as the nose of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, one of his customers. Frantic with worry, Ivan decides to dispose of the nose, hoping that it can't be traced back to him, while, across town, Kovalyov is waking up to discover a shock of his own: his nose has vanished, to be replaced with a flat and featureless expanse of skin. Indignantly the aspirational Kovalyov sets off in the hope of recovering his nose which, it transpires is having a whale of a time without him and seems to have adopted an even higher social status than that of its erstwhile owner ('my nose,' exclaims the unfortunate Kovalyov, 'is driving at this very moment all over town, calling itself a state counsellor').

Written in 1836, Gogol's famous story is deliciously surreal. The nose changes size and costume several times, as if to escape detection: the police finally 'intercepted it just as it was boarding the stagecoach bound for Riga. Its passport was made out in the name of a civil servant. Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.' There seem to be several learned theories about what this little piece of nonsense actually means: is it a castration allegory? A satire on social mobility and people with ideas above their station? Or simply the latest in a long line of Russian fables about errant body parts? Gogol's proboscidal classic sits here alongside another of his short stories, The Carriage. Even less happens here than in The Nose, but it seems once again to be a social satire on the pretensions of its hapless protagonist Chertokutsky, who manages to make a fool of himself in front of the very people he most wishes to impress.

I'd love to read some more of Gogol's short stories and I'm now rather curious about Shostakovich's operatic adaptation of The Nose, which might be amusing. (P.S. Fun fact: Gogol was apparently self-conscious about the size of his own nose.) ( )