Abstract
Focused on Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist tale, “The Nose” (1835), this article is an investigation into the concealed representation of suppressed and marginalized libertine and anti-religious discourses in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The author identifies overlooked idiomatic phraseology, forgotten specificities of the Imperial hierarchy (the Table of Ranks), and allusions to religious customs and Christian rituals that would have been apparent to Gogol’s readers and shows how some were camouflaged to escape censorship in successive drafts of the work. The research builds on the approaches to Gogol’s language, imagery and plot developed earlier by the Russian Formalists, Tartu-Moscow semioticians, and a few other scholars, who revealed the latent obscenity of Gogol’s “rhinology” and the sacrilegious meaning of the tale’s very specific chronotope. The previous scholars’ observations are substantially supplemented by original findings. An integrated analysis of these aspects in their mutual relationship is required to understand what the telling details of the story reveal about Gogol’s religious and psychological crisis of the mid-1830s and to demonstrate how he aggregated indecent Shandyism, social satire, and religious blasphemy into a single quasi-oneiric narrative.
Highlights
Encyclopedia Britannica presents Nikolai Gogol as “one of the finest comic authors of world literature, and perhaps its most accomplished nonsense writer” (Morson 1998, p. 1007)
Questions of morality and religion were always central to his thinking, his comic and satirical genius overshadowed his dubious achievements in practical theology (Meditations) and notorious failure as a moral teacher (Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends)
Gogol has objected to the printing of this jest for a long time; but we found in it so much that was unexpected, fantastic, merry, and original that we persuaded him to allow us to share with the public the enjoyment afforded us by his manuscript. (Gogol 1836, p. 54; quoted in Setchkarev 1965, p. 155)
Summary
Encyclopedia Britannica presents Nikolai Gogol as “one of the finest comic authors of world literature, and perhaps its most accomplished nonsense writer” (Morson 1998, p. 1007). Questions of morality and religion were always central to his thinking, his comic and satirical genius overshadowed his dubious achievements in practical theology (Meditations) and notorious failure as a moral teacher (Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends). It is generally (and justly) believed that his worldview found a more adequate expression in his fiction rather than in his critical and instructional prose, and this explains why I selected Gogol’s most grotesque and absurdist work to represent him in a volume on East Slavic religion(s), using Meditations only as a point of comparison in the last section of my analysis
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