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Great resource for undergraduates, graduates and scholars alike
Valuable insight into St. Petersburg everyday life during Gogol's time, inaccessible to the modern Western reader, as well as to many Russian readers. Blank's observations are based on her long-term experience of teaching "The Nose" in upper-level Russian language and literature courses at Princeton.
The Guide offers a close reading of "The Nose" that focuses on confusing details, statements that have figurative or connotative meaning, oddly formed sentences and literally interpreted idioms, as well as many other obscure remarks made by the author in his witty banter with the reader.
Provides full text of "The Nose" in Russian
Although there exists a vast corpus of secondary literature on Gogol's "The Nose" in both Russian and Western scholarship, this literary companion provides a comprehensive view of this little gem of Russian literature in a single volume.
Perfect resource for academic libraries, particularly with strong literature or Russian/Eastern European programs
List of contents
Table of Contents
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction
Part One. How ¿The Nose¿ Is Made¿. ¿. ¿¿¿¿¿¿ «¿¿¿»
Annotations to the Russian Text
Language Game as the Engine of the Plot
Part Two. Interpretations 1. Joke, Jest, Anecdote
2. Social Satire
3. Mockery of the Demonic and of the Sacred
4. Chronicle of Folk Superstitions
5. A Case of Castration Anxiety
6. An Echo of German Romanticism
7. Perfect Nonsense
8. Shostakovich¿s Opera
The Nose
9. A Play with Reality: ¿The Nose,¿ Kafka, and Dalí
Instead of a Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
About the author
Ksana Blank is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author of
Dostoevsky¿s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin (Northwestern University, 2010) and
Spaces of Creativity: Essays on Russian Literature and the Arts (Academic Studies Press, 2016).
Summary
This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol's absurdist masterpiece The Nose. The book focuses on numerous instances of the writer's wordplay, and presents an overview of major critical approaches to the story in Gogol scholarship.
