SOURCE: Oz, Amos. “With an Expression of Very Respectable Importance: On the Beginning of Gogol's ‘The Nose.’” In The Story Begins: Essays on Literature, pp. 28–36. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.

In the following essay, Oz contends that the various distortions of logic in the telling of “The Nose” represents the garbled logic of Russian bureaucracy.

“The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol first appeared in 1836, sixty years before Fontane's Effi Briest and ninety years before Agnon's “In the Prime of Her Life.” “The Nose” is the story of the nose of one Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, a major by the name of Platon Kuzmich Kovalyov. This nose abandons its owner and sets off to wander around the city, dressed in an official uniform woven with gold threads, hires a carriage for its pleasure, piously bows and prays in church and is, in the end, arrested by the police when it is about...