SOURCE: Karlinsky, Simon. “Surrealism: ‘The Nose.’” In The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, pp. 123–30. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

In the following excerpt, Karlinsky views “The Nose” as a work of surrealist fiction.

The world inhabited by the protagonists of the St. Petersburg stories is a threatening world of sudden reversals, deceptive appearances, and unimagined danger emerging from unsuspected quarters. In “The Portrait” this state of affairs is attributed to the mystically corrupting power of money and to the machinations of the Antichrist; in “Nevsky Prospect” to the demon of deception who lights the lanterns so that they show everything in a false light; in “Diary of a Madman” to the insanity of the narrator. When Gogol began writing “The Nose,” he intended to motivate the absurdities, incongruities, and deliberate illogicality of this story by presenting it as a bad dream of the hero's. The Russian title of the...