SOURCE: Woodward, James B. “‘The Nose.’” In The Symbolic Art of Gogol: Essays on His Short Fiction, pp. 63–87. Colombus, OH: Slavica, 1982.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1981, Woodward contends that “The Nose” describes an allegorical war between the sexes in which the masculine triumphs over the feminine.

If “Old-World Landowners” is the most deceptive of Gogol's stories, “The Nose” is certainly the most perplexing. Naturally enough, there are still many readers who readily invoke Pushkin's description of the tale as “a joke” and argue fervently that any attempt to interpret its bizarre content as expressive of some single all-embracing idea is a totally misguided and futile exercise. But inevitably the work has continued to inspire such attempts. Not only does it seem improbable, as N. I. Oulianoff has observed,¹ that Gogol's state of mind was conducive to the writing of jokes in the “terrible year”² of 1833 when...