Nikolai Gogol was a Russian-Ukrainian fiction writer and playwright who moved to St. Petersburg after school with the goal of becoming a renowned literary author, but was met with the depressing reality of Russia’s bureaucratic system. Much of Gogol’s work, from “The Nose” to other stories like “The Overcoat” and “Diary of a Madman,” satirizes the bureaucracy created by the Table of Ranks, mocking the provincial social climbers who desperately grasped at the opportunity to earn a noble title. It is worth noting that Gogol’s family were part of the petty gentry, a class of nobility that did not own serfs and looked after their own small properties, so Gogol’s nobility was hereditary rather than gained through the Table of Ranks system. However, he still needed to work within the system and spent many years of his life at soulless office jobs in St. Petersburg; his letters home to his family detailed his loneliness and misery within this bureaucratic system. Gogol also despised the pretentious posturing that was born from what he perceived to be an arbitrary and meaningless ranking system. Many of his works, including “The Nose,” described the despicable treatment of lower-ranked officials by high-ranking officials, all based on random and ambiguous titles. No other writer was as important as Gogol in preserving the sense of absurdity and randomness surrounding the period of time in which Russia employed the Table of Ranks, which was destroyed after the Bolshevik revolution.

“The Nose” also explores some of Gogol’s existential concerns. Gogol’s personal correspondences show that he was self-conscious about the appearance of his own nose, which likely influenced his interest in the effect a nose or lack of nose might have on the way a person is perceived. Gogol was an introverted and secretive person who was often seen as strange and mysterious by his peers. Despite his ambition, he was insecure, and it didn’t help that his early writing, often unconventional, was widely derided by publishers before it finally began to be appreciated later in Gogol’s career. Gogol felt that he was different and did not belong in the hierarchical civic world he was forced to live in. However, these differences allowed Gogol to flourish into a highly original writer who would go on to inspire such literary greats as Dostoevsky.

“The Nose” was an influential early work in the literary style of surrealism. Gogol initially imagined ending the short story with a reveal that Kovalyov had been dreaming the entire affair of the missing nose, and early drafts of the text included this twist. However, the final draft does not involve waking from a dream, concluding instead with a few self-aware and tongue-in-cheek closing comments from the narrator. This is noteworthy because, without the framework of the dream, the story leaves the realm of realism and leans into surrealism and magical realism. When “The Nose” was published in 1836, these genres were not yet named or popularized in literary circles, and would not become recognized genres until the early 20th century. Thus, the surrealism employed in “The Nose” firmly places Gogol in the ranks of those original and influential writers who laid the foundational groundwork of surrealism, which would go on to become a prominent literary style.

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