"The Nose": A Stylistic and Critical Companion to Nikolai Gogol's Story

by Ksana Blank (Editor)

Overview

This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist masterpiece “The Nose.” Part I focuses on numerous instances of the writer’s wordplay, which is meant to surprise and delight the reader, but which often is lost in English translations. It traces Gogol’s descriptions of everyday life in St. Petersburg, familiar to the writer’s contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical interpretations of the story in Gogol scholarship from the time of its publication to the present, as well as its connections to the works of Shostakovich, Kafka, Dalí, and Kharms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644695203
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Series:	Companions to Russian Literature
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ksana Blank is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author of Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin (Northwestern University, 2010) and Spaces of Creativity: Essays on Russian Literature and the Arts (Academic Studies Press, 2016).

Table of Contents

Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction

Part One. How “The Nose” Is Made

Н. В. Гоголь «Нос»
Annotations to the Russian Text
Language Game as the Engine of the Plot

Part Two. Interpretations

1. Joke, Jest, Anecdote
2. Social Satire
3. Mockery of the Demonic and of the Sacred
4. Chronicle of Folk Superstitions
5. A Case of Castration Anxiety
6. An Echo of German Romanticism
7. Perfect Nonsense
8. Shostakovich’s Opera The Nose
9. A Play with Reality: “The Nose,” Kafka, and Dalí

Instead of a Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This deeply informed commentary on the text of ‘The Nose’ explains religious and cultural material and reveals thematic threads concealed in the Russian. Ksana Blank’s compendium makes meaningful detail accessible and deploys it in a variety of possible interpretations. The commentary and essays together provide English speakers access to the verbal riches of the original that allows them to achieve their own closely-argued reading of Gogol’s gem.”

—Priscilla Meyer, Professor of Russian Language and Literature, Emerita, Wesleyan University

“An admirably illuminating, multifaceted, and thorough analysis of Gogol’s classic story, as well as a consistent pleasure to read—in short, a model of its kind.”

—Donald Fanger, Harry Levin Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

“Ksana Blank’s commentary to ‘The Nose’ will be useful not only to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, but also to scholars, particularly to those who do not speak Russian natively. She has an admirable ability to reconstruct the context of Gogol’s St. Petersburg, both in the everyday life of the capital and in the idioms that Gogol consciously fractures and rearranges.”

—Michael Wachtel, Princeton University

Editorial Reviews

Ksana Blank’s companion to Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ is an excellent new resource for students of Russian language and literature… The annotations to the text are remarkably thorough and identify allusions, irony, and colloquialisms that the casual reader may miss and the second-language student may struggle with even while paying great attention. These annotations are informed by a deep understanding of the historical and social context of the work; they not only identify interesting linguistic moments, but also point out ways in which the nineteenth-century Russian reader would have understood Gogol’s text… ‘The Nose’: A Stylistic and Critical Companion is a helpful resource for students of Russian literature as well as for scholars new to Gogol criticism. Its attention to style and language is especially refreshing. It provides a much-needed close reading of the story that will hopefully inspire other, similarly detailed analyses of Gogol’s works.”

– Sara Jo Powell, Harvard University, Russian Language Journal

“Ksana Blank’s commentary to “The Nose” will be useful not only to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, but also to scholars, particularly to those who do not speak Russian natively. She has an admirable ability to reconstruct the context of Gogol’s St. Petersburg, both in the everyday life of the capital and in the idioms that Gogol consciously fractures and rearranges.”
- Michael Wachtel, Princeton University

From the Publisher