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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 MadeН. В. Гоголь «Нос»
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.” Part I focuses on numerous instances of the writer’s wordplay, which is meant to surprise and delight the reader, but which often is lost in English translations. It traces Gogol’s descriptions of everyday life in St. Petersburg, familiar to the writer’s contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical interpretations of the story in Gogol scholarship from the time of its publication to the present, as well as its connections to the works of Shostakovich, Kafka, Dalí, and Kharms.
Additional text
“Ksana Blank’s commentary to “The Nose” will be useful not only to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, but also to scholars, particularly to those who do not speak Russian natively. She has an admirable ability to reconstruct the context of Gogol’s St. Petersburg, both in the everyday life of the capital and in the idioms that Gogol consciously fractures and rearranges.”
- Michael Wachtel, Princeton University
