The Nose

Collegiate Assessor “Major” Kovalyov is Gogol’s protagonist in The Nose: a civil officer of Imperial Russia who takes great pride in his appearance, looks down on others, likes to pick up women, and treats working class people very disrespectfully. His rank is everything to him:

to add to his own importance and dignity, he never described himself as a Collegiate Assessor, that is to say, a civil servant of the eighth rank, but always as a major, that is to say, by the corresponding rank in the army” (208).

When Kovalyov wakes one day to find that his nose has inexplicably disappeared from his face, his comfortable life is thrown into disarray. When he encounters the missing nose cavorting around town in the uniform of a State Councillor—a rank Kovalyov himself can only dream of one day attaining—he teeters on the edge of an existential crisis.

Kovalyov, however, is too fundamentally shallow and status-obsessed for this crisis to lead to any useful insight. He endures a period of great agitation, hiding his face from friends and strangers alike while doing everything he can to manipulate the city's institutions of power—the newspaper, the police force—to his advantage. He encounters obstacles at every turn, but nothing induces him to reconsider his superficial view of the world.