SOURCE: Merrill, Reed. “The Grotesque in Music: Shostakovich's Nose.” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 23, (winter 1990): 303–14.

In the following essay, Merrill discusses elements of the comic-grotesque in both Gogol's original short story “The Nose” and the 1930 operatic adaptation, The Nose.

The difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant.

If parallel lines do not meet it is not because they cannot, but because they have other things to do.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol

Dmitri Shostakovich's opera The Nose (Nos) was begun in 1928, when he was twenty, and it was first performed on January 18, 1930, in Leningrad's Little Theater. Based upon Nikolai Gogol's comic masterpiece, it also is a mocking satire concerning the loss of a man's nose in nineteenth-century Petersburg. The opera was Shostakovich's first, although he wrote incidental music for an operatic version of Mayakovsky's The Bedbug in 1929. The libretto for The Nose...