SOURCE: Shukman, Ann. “Gogol's ‘The Nose’ or the Devil in the Works.” In Nikolay Gogol: Text and Context, edited by Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell, pp. 64–82. London: Macmillan, 1989.

In the following essay, Shukman asserts that a valid interpretation of “The Nose” must take into account that which is excluded from the narrative through various omissions, digressions, and ellipses.

If ‘The Nose’ had been written in French or English, or if, on the other hand, post-structuralism had taken root in Moscow and Leningrad, Gogol's tale might well have become a proof text for deconstructive exegesis. Constructed on a pun, replete with paradoxes, illogicalities, games and mystifications with the reader, the tale is ‘unreadable’ in the sense that it resists any single definitive reading or ‘univocal’ meaning; and indeed, to use deconstructionist terms, it might be argued that it contains within itself, ‘jostling irreconcilably with one another, both logocentric metaphysics...