Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 14 Feb 2018

The Nose by Nikolai Gogol and a version retold by Andrea Camilleri

I recently wrote a piece for the Letterpress Project in which I bemoaned the fact that I find myself unable to read – that I was in fact intimidated by - some of the masterpieces of Russian literature. I resolved to try weaning myself back onto the genre by trying the short stories of Gogol or Gorky and, by chance, having come across an illustrated retelling of Gogol’s The Nose, this seemed an excellent place to start.

I started by reading Gogol’s original which is a spare, absurdist tale that mercilessly pricks pomposity and self-satisfaction. Told in précis, the story seems like something from a frivolous book of humour. A baker wakes one day to discover that a man’s nose has found its way into the middle of one of his freshly baked bread rolls. Uncertain what this means, the baker takes the nose out into St. Petersburg and tries to lose it. The nose, it turns out belongs to Major Kovalev who is not a military officer but a sort of jumped-up civil servant who is very pleased with himself. He wakes to find that not only has his nose disappeared from his face but it’s taken on a life of its own, touring around town dressed in its own finery.

Kovalev tries unsuccessfully to confront his nose in church and then has an hilarious interlude trying to get a newspaper to carry and advertisement canvassing the return of his nose. Eventually his nose is returned to him by the police who have captured it trying to make its escape from the city in a coach. After a short time of worrying that he won’t be able to reattach his nose, he awakes one morning to find it back in place, never to leave his face again.

Gogol clearly isn’t interested in writing a story that holds together in any conventional sense – the satire is more important than the unities of place, character and action. Characters simply drop out of the story without explanation; there’s no attempt to explain how the nose ends up in a bun but isn’t itself cooked; he doesn’t offer reasons why the nose left the face or why it returned nor how it was able to live for a while as an independent individual. The role of the absurd as a tool for social commentary requires no acknowledgement or recognition by the author if it’s going to work effectively.

Andrea Camilleri’s retelling allows him to use a more contemporary idiom and vocabulary but beyond that he’s very faithful to the story. What he does add to the original however are some very congenial and diverting contextual comments about Gogol himself, how the story was received in its own time and the changes and compromises the author had to make to get the story past the censors and published in the Russia of 1836.

What I especially liked was the revelation that Gogol originally wrote an alternative ending for the story in which Kovalev wakes to find that the whole episode of his nose was just a dream and that everything returns to normal as he gets out of bed. But he was, I think fortunately, smart enough to see that this would be a mistake and instead opted for the open, ambiguous conclusion we’ve got now.

Camilleri’s version is illustrated delightfully by the Slovenian artist, Maja Celija who graduated from the European Institute of Design in Milan. She captures the absurdity of the story without question or interpretation and she doesn’t try to ‘normalise’ events in any way. Her depiction of the nose in its uniform is particularly wonderful.

Taken together, the original story and the rewrite, make a thoughtful and provocative combination that I thoroughly enjoyed. The Nose is often cited as the favourite short story of many other short story writers and being admired by those who practice the same art is probably the highest praise any work could get.

 

Terry Potter

February 2018