SOURCE: Brown, William Edward. “Nikolai Gogol: St. Petersburg Stories and Comedies.” In A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, Volume Four, pp. 306–11. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Brown maintains that “The Nose” should not be interpreted as a story containing a moral message, but should be understood as a tale which “exists for itself.”

“The Nose,”¹ … is one of the most complex, and certainly one of the most controversial things that Gogol ever wrote. The most diverse interpretations have been put upon it, from the solemn Marxist orthodoxy, that it was written as an expose of the vulgar, trivial capital society of the reign of Nikolai I, to the predictable Freudian analysis in which Major Kovalyov's nose becomes a sexual symbol.² As a matter of fact, a certain amount of truth can be found in most of these interpretations. Their chief failing is...