SOURCE: Spycher, Peter C. “N. V. Gogol's ‘The Nose’: A Satirical Comic Fantasy Born of an Impotence Complex.” Slavic and East European Journal 7, no. 4 (winter 1963): 361–74.

In the following essay, Spycher discusses sexual symbolism in “The Nose,” asserting that the loss of the nose symbolizes a loss of sexual power.

The story “The Nose”¹ has everywhere and always met with a great deal of mirth and with an equal amount of puzzlement once the question of its meaning has been raised.²

One of the more recent Gogol' biographers, V. Setchkarev, has advanced the following, at first rather alluring and certainly very convenient opinion. Interpreting Puškin's artistic creed as art for art's sake, Setchkarev argues that, in creating “The Nose,” Gogol' deliberately applied this artistic principle, and simply played with the various devices of story-telling, and thus fooled the reader who always looks for a “deeper meaning” if not...