The Nose (part 1)

The first part of a story by this Russian writer.  You can read the original here.

I.

On March 25th in St. Petersburg an extraordinarily strange occurrence took place.  The barber Ivan Yakovlevich (his surname has been lost; even his placard featuring a sudsy-cheeked gentleman with the inscription "And there will be blood" has nothing more), residing on Voznesenski Avenue, the barber Ivan Yakovlevich awakened rather early and detected the smell of hot bread.  Sitting up a bit in his bed he saw that his wife, an utterly honorable woman who loved to drink coffee, was removing just-baked breads from the oven.

"Today, Praskovya Osipovna, I won't be having coffee," said Ivan Yakovlevich.  "Instead, I would like a hot bun with onion."

(That is to say, Ivan Yakovlevich would have liked to have both, yet knew it was fairly impossible to demand two things at once as Praskovya Osipovna really did not like such megrims).  "Let the fool eat bread; all the better for me," thought his wife to herself.  "There'll be an extra serving of coffee."  And she tossed a bun on the table. 

For propriety's sake Ivan Yakovlevich put on coattails over his shirt and, having sat down at the table, sprinkled some salt, prepared two heads of onion, and took up a knife in his hands.  Then he made a knowing face and set to cutting his bread.  Having cut the bread in two halves, he looked at the center and espied something white.  Ivan Yakovlevich prodded it carefully with his knife then groped it with his finger.  "Solid!" he said to himself.  "What could it be?"

He stuck his fingers in and pulled out – a nose!  Ivan Yakovlevich let his hands fall; rubbing his eyes, he began to grope the object.  Indeed, it was a nose!  It seemed to him somewhat familiar – and Ivan Yakovlevich's face was suddenly filled with horror.  But this horror was nothing compared to the indignation that came over his wife. 

"Where did you cut off that nose, you pig?!"  began her wrath.  "Swindler!  Drunkard!  I'm going to report you to the police personally, you thieving swine!  I already heard from three people that you fiddle so extensively when you shave your customers that their noses can barely stay on!"

But Ivan Yakovlevich was neither alive nor dead.  He realized the owner of the nose was none other than the collegial assessor Kovalev, whom he shaved every Wednesday and Sunday.     

"Hold on, Praskovya Osipovna! I'll just wrap it in a handkerchief and place it in the corner.  Let's let it lie there a wee while, and then I'll take it back."

"Absolutely not!  So that I can have a sliced-off nose sitting around my house?  You blubbery worm!  A worm, I might add, who only knows how to sling his blade around and in no way ever fulfills his duties, you idling, amoral lump!  So that I defend you to the police?  Now that is some twaddle, you filthy rat!  Begone with it!  Begone!  Remove it anywhere you please, as long as I do not have to inhale its fumes!"

Ivan Yakovlevich was still standing there as if dead.  He thought and thought and still didn't know what to think.

"Who the devil knows how this happened!" he said at length, scratching behind his ear.  "At this point I probably couldn't tell you whether I came home drunk yesterday.  But impossible events must befall all objects, because bread is a baked item and noses most certainly are not!  I just can't figure it out!"

Ivan Yakovlevich fell silent. The thought of the police searching him for the nose and then accusing him made him completely numb.  He imagined now the scarlet collar, handsomely lined in silver, the sword, and his whole body trembled.  He soon found his underwear and shoes, threw on this ragged heap, and, accompanied by Praskovya Osipovna's unmild remonstrances, tucked the nose into a handkerchief and went out onto the street.

He wanted to stash it under something, beneath the curbside stone by the gates, for example, or accidentally drop it somewhere then hasten down an alley.  Alas, he immediately bumped into an acquaintance who began with that terrible question, "Where are you off to?" and Ivan Yakovlevich could not get away for even a minute.  His second time around he actually managed the drop, but a distant sentry waved his halberd and beseeched: "You dropped something!  Pick it up!"  And Ivan Yakovlevich had to retrieve the nose and return it to his pocket.  Despair prevailed upon him, all the more as the pedestrians incessantly multiplied and stores and shops pushed open their shutters.

He opted to head for Saint Isaac's bridge – couldn't he at least manage to toss it in the Neva? ... And here I'm afraid I am somewhat guilty, as I have said nothing about Ivan Yakovlevich, an honorable man in many respects.

Ivan Yakovlevich, like every honest, decent Russian workman, was a stupendous boozehound.  And although every day he shaved the chins and cheeks of others, his own jaw remained forever unshaven.  Ivan Yakovlevich's tail coat (Ivan Yakovlevich never wore a frock coat) was piebald; that is to say, it was black with grey and brownish-yellow clouds. His collar was glossy, and instead of three buttons only threads hovered.  Ivan Yakovlevich was also a remarkable cynic, and when collegiate assessor Kovalev would habitually inform him during the shave, "Your hands, Ivan Yakovlevich, always smell!" – Ivan Yakovlevich would answer "Now why would they smell?"  "I don't know, friend, but they smell," the collegiate assessor would reply.  And having snorted some tobacco, Ivan Yakovlevich would lather him for that on his cheeks, under his nose, behind his ears and below his beard – in a word, wherever he jolly well desired.

Now this honorable citizen had already reached Saint Isaac's bridge.  First, he took a quick look around; then he leaned over the railing as if he were looking under the bridge to see whether there weren't some fish splashing about – and the handkerchief and nose were surreptitiously tossed.  He felt as if he had just shed ten poods!  Ivan Yakovlevich even laughed!  And instead of shaving bureaucrat chins he headed for an institution by the name of "Food and tea" (so read the sign) to order himself a glass of punch, when suddenly at the far end of the bridge he noticed a housing inspector of aristocratic appearance sporting a sword, broad sideburns and a triangular hat.  Ivan Yakovlevich went numb; just then the housing inspector wagged his finger at him and said:

"Come hither, my dear sir!"

Knowing the procedure, Ivan Yakovlevich removed his hat even though he was still far away, swiftly approached the inspector, and then said:

"To your health, your lordship!"

"No, no, my good sir, no lordship.  Tell me now, what you were you doing standing out there on the bridge?"

"I swear, sir, I was on my way to shave, but I simply wanted to see whether the fish weren't bustling about."

"Lies, lies!  You won't get out of it that easily!  Kindly answer the question!"

"I am prepared, your grace, to shave you twice even three times a week, without the slightest objection," answered Ivan Yakovlevich.

"Sheer poppycock, friend!  Poppycock, you hear me?  I already have three barbers shaving me and they all deem it a great honor.  Now kindly explain what you were doing on that bridge!"

Ivan Yakovlevich grew very pale ... And here a fog engulfs our events, and about what happened next nothing more is known.

Nikolai Gogol

Ten years ago, I happened to attend a conference on the literature of this country whose name has been slightly amended since 1993.  One of the conference’s more spirited speakers, an ethnic Ukrainian, recalled a conversation he had had with a famous Russian–born writer at a cocktail party years before.  After the usual small talk on wind and weather, the Russian became curious:

Writer: You have an accent in English.  Are you from Europe?
Ukrainian: I’m from Ukraine.
Writer: From Urania?   [walks away]

Whether such an exchange ever occurred (the joke has the bitter flavor of truth) is not as interesting as the context.  Contempt for Ukrainian literature and the concept of Ukraine as a cultural and political entity independent of both Poland and Russia is still widespread, owing largely to its lack of famous men and women of letters.  Although the founder of the modern language was a poet and artist whose balding head, handlebar moustache, and resigned chin (to the fate of his native tongue, some would say) are engraved into numerous monuments worldwide, his existence is practically unacknowledged outside Slavic departments.  Even in those hallowed halls enthusiasts tend, after Russian, to study Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian before knitting their brows at the oddities of the Ukrainian alphabet, Cyrillic with a sprinkling of one–eyes and two–eyes.  Most Ukrainian writers, history regrets to inform us, chose other mediums in which to express themselves.  And none was weirder and more brilliant than this small dainty man, the subject of one of the English language's most succulent literary biographies.              

 

Succulent thanks to the slow, effortless circles which the biographer, himself one of the finest craftsman in both Russian and English, sketches around young Gogol.  We begin with Gogol’s death and end with his birth, and in–between we find that our long–standing impressions of nineteenth–century Russia owe much to his handiwork:

Symbolism with him [Gogol] took on a physiological aspect, in this case optical.  The mutterings of passers–by were again symbolic, this time an auditory effect which was meant to render the hectic loneliness of a poor man in an opulent crowd.  Gogol, and Gogol alone, spoke to himself as he walked, but the monologue was echoed and multiplied by the shadows of his mind.  Passing as it were through Gogol’s temperament, St. Petersburg acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century, losing it when it ceased to be the capital of an empire.

This is very much the oddness of Petersburg that pervades Russian literature from Pushkin to Bely, the incongruity of traditional European architecture and customs against the thoughts and rapturous originality of its natives.  I have not been to Petersburg in a few years, but little has changed.  Thirty years passed between Nabokov’s last spring in his hometown and the passage above, which, fifty years later felt like it had been culled from the evening edition of Argumenty i fakty.  The point is that Gogol, and Gogol alone, changed Russian literature both for its creators and its admirers, domestic and otherwise.  With the possible exception of Pushkin, he is more responsible than any author for how Slavic literary scholars have evaluated the last two hundred years.  

He did not, however, come about this brilliance by living the simple and successful life of an academically–minded writer who spends days in a library and nights behind his desk.  A soft, effeminate man, Gogol was completely impractical in mind and body: he was constantly impecunious, ill, or both; he loved to fib and exaggerate because, like all great writers, fiction was far richer than the worries of a mortal; he listened to no one but himself, fled from creditors and would–be benefactors alike, and traveled alone and aimlessly in Europe for years as if trying to absorb its culture by sponging its streets with his boots.  The results were few (Gogol would die, we are told immediately, in his early forties after an abortive leeching cure) but magnificent and his modest corpus is still studied with avidity by Russianists everywhere.  Nabokov demolishes some previous attempts at rendering Gogol’s eccentric prose (so badly, in fact, that I don’t think any publisher would have ever hired these poor dead souls ever again) and supplies his own passages, which display his own mastery and wit and swell and ebb with the same unmistakable rhythm of Nabokov’s discursive writings.  All of which, I may add, could probably not be written any more clearly or concisely, nor with more passion and understanding for his subject.

Yet Gogol’s most significant contribution may well be his obsession with a rather untranslatable word, poshlost’, about which Nabokov digresses for over twenty pages.  Poshlost’ has no precise English synonym (the German Kitsch is probably the closest, although this latter is strictly speaking an aesthetic term), but might be explained as the "the belief in or propagation of superficial, sentimental and populist values as true culture."  Examples would be pop and paparazzi shows and magazines or any Hollywood love or war story, but with a modicum of discipline these can be ignored.  Much more egregious offenders are books which might portray an earnest young man who, in an effort to "make it in the world," befriends some multicultural characters, falls in love with sunsets, dogs and soft jazz, repeats to himself that life is really not about the pursuit of material wealth — although he doesn't quite convince the reader of that — and, at the end of his "journey," metaphorically envisions humanity's fate in the hands of the scattered few around him.  Most books, as it were, fall into this disreputable category.  The word itself is in very common usage in modern Russian, and has come to signify the unshakeable twitch that surfaces upon hearing or seeing something so absolutely false and so infuriatingly pandering to common thought and common happiness that even pacifists like myself want to smack someone in the vicinity.  To Russians' great credit, the word is extremely old and consistently applied; and to Gogol’s credit, he is in every way the opposite of it, just like Tomas is a “monster in the kingdom of kitsch” in this novel.

And to Nabokov’s credit, he restrains himself for the most part from overtaking his beloved forerunner.  Yes, it is Nabokov’s show; but if you are familiar with his work, you know that he cannot share a stage to save his life and that his imprint is indelibly left on everything he touches.   He even has time to tell us about his deepest fears:

In his Dikanka and Taras Bulba phase .... Gogol was skirting a very dreadful precipice.  He almost became the writer of Ukrainian folklore tales and ‘colorful romances.’  We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost.  When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dneipr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.

This alternative reality may sound terrifying to Gogol connoisseurs, but some Ukrainians probably would not have minded.  And they would have deeply resented any comments on their status as a minor literature just as much as crude puns, of which Nabokov was particularly fond.   Pity that young Ukrainian writer could only remember Nabokov's last two comments.