All the men about town, the habitués of society parties, who liked to amuse ladies and whose resources had by that time been exhausted, were extremely glad of all these goings-on. A small percentage of respectable and well-meaning people were extremely displeased. One gentleman said indignantly that he could not understand how in this enlightened age such senseless stories could spread and that he was surprised at the government’s failure to take heed of it. This gentleman apparently was one of those gentlemen who would like to embroil the government in everything, even in their daily quarrels with their wives. After that . . . ​but here again the whole incident is shrouded in fog, and what happened afterwards is absolutely unknown.

  III

  Utterly nonsensical things happen in this world. Sometimes there is absolutely no rhyme or reason in them: suddenly the very nose which had been going around with the rank of a state councillor and created such a stir in the city, found itself again, as though nothing were the matter, in its proper place, that is to say, between the two cheeks of Major Kovalyov. This happened on April 7th. Waking up and chancing to look in the mirror, he sees—his nose! He grabbed it with his hand—his nose indeed! “Aha!” said Kovalyov, and in his joy he very nearly broke into a barefooted dance round the room, but Ivan’s entry stopped him. He told Ivan to bring him some water to wash in and, while washing, glanced again at the mirror—his nose! Drying himself with his towel, he again glanced at the mirror—his nose! [ 23 ]

  “Take a look, Ivan, I think there’s a pimple on my nose,” he said, and in the meantime thought, “How awful if Ivan says: ‘Why, no sir, not only there is no pimple but also the nose itself is gone!’ ”

  But Ivan said: “Nothing, sir, no pimple—your nose is fine!”

  “That’s great, damn it!” the major said to himself, snapping his fingers. At that moment the barber Ivan Yakovlevich peeped in at the door but as timidly as a cat which had just been whipped for stealing lard.

  “First you tell me—are your hands clean?” Kovalyov shouted to him before he had approached.

  “They are.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I swear they are, sir.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  Kovalyov sat down. Ivan Yakovlevich draped him with a napkin and instantly, with the help of a shaving brush, transformed his chin and part of his cheek into the whipped cream served at merchants’ namesday parties. “Well, I never!” Ivan Yakovlevich said to himself, glancing at his nose, and then cocked his head on the other side and looked at it sideways: “Look at that! Just you try and figure that out,” he continued and took a good look at his nose. At last, gently, with the greatest care imaginable, he raised two fingers to grasp it by the tip. Such was Ivan Yakovlevich’s method.

  “Now, now, now, look out there!” cried Kovalyov. Dumbfounded and confused as never before in his life, Ivan Yakovlevich let his hands drop. At last he began cautiously tickling him with the razor under the chin, and although it wasn’t at all handy for him and difficult to shave without holding on to the olfactory portion of the face, nevertheless, somehow bracing his gnarled thumb against the cheek and the lower jaw, he finally overcame all obstacles and finished shaving him. [ 24 ]

  When everything was ready, Kovalyov hastened to dress, hired a cab and went straight to the coffee-house. Before he was properly inside the door he shouted, “Boy, a cup of chocolate!” and immediately made for the mirror: the nose was there. He turned round cheerfully and looked ironically, slightly screwing up one eye, at two military gentlemen one of whom had a nose no bigger than a waistcoat button. After that he set off for the office of the department where he was trying to obtain the post of a vice-governor or, failing that, of a procurement officer. Passing through the reception room, he glanced in the mirror: the nose was there. Then he went to visit another collegiate assessor or major, a great wag, to whom he often said in reply to various derisive remarks: “Oh, come off it, I know you, you’re a kidder.” On the way there he thought: “If the major doesn’t explode with laughter on seeing me, it’s a sure sign that everything is in its proper place.” The collegiate assessor did not explode. “That’s great, that’s great, damn it!” Kovalyov thought to himself. On the street he met Mrs. Podtochina, the field officer’s wife, together with her daughter, bowed to them and was hailed with joyful exclamations, and so everything was all right, no part of him was missing. He talked with them a very long time and, deliberately taking out his snuff-box, right in front of them kept stuffing his nose with snuff at both entrances for a very long time, saying to himself: “So much for you, you women, you stupid hens! I won’t marry the daughter all the same. Anything else, par amour—by all means.” And from that time on, Major Kovalyov went strolling about as though nothing had happened, both on Nevsky Avenue, and in the theaters, and everywhere. And his nose too, as though nothing had happened, stayed on his face, betraying no sign of having played truant. And thereafter Major Kovalyov was always seen in good humor, smiling, running after absolutely all the pretty ladies, and once even stopping in front of a little shop in Gostinny Dvor and buying himself the ribbon of some order, goodness knows why, for he hadn’t been decorated with any order. [ 25 ]

  That is the kind of affair that happened in the northern capital of our vast empire. Only now, on second thoughts, can we see that there is much that is improbable in it. Without speaking of the fact that the supernatural detachment of the nose and its appearance in various places in the guise of a state councillor is indeed strange, how is it that Kovalyov did not realize that one does not advertise for one’s nose through the newspaper office? I do not mean to say that advertising rates appear to me too high: that’s nonsense, and I am not at all one of those mercenary people. But it’s improper, embarrassing, not nice! And then again—how did the nose come to be in a newly baked loaf, and how about Ivan Yakovlevich? . . . No, this is something I can’t understand, positively can’t understand. But the strangest, the most incomprehensible thing of all, is how authors can choose such subjects. I confess that this is quite inconceivable; it is indeed . . . ​no, no, I just can’t understand it at all! In the first place, there is absolutely no benefit in it for the fatherland; in the second place . . . ​but in the second place, there is no benefit either. I simply don’t know what to make of it. . . .

  And yet, in spite of it all, though, of course, we may assume this and that and the other, perhaps even . . . ​And after all, where aren’t there incongruities?—But all the same, when you think about it, there really is something in all this. Whatever anyone says, such things happen in this world; rarely, but they do. ✦

  * * *

  * [Earlier in the story her first name is Pelageya.—EDITOR, 1992.]

  THE DOOR TO THE TRUTH MIGHT BE STRANGENESS

  THOUGHTS ON “THE NOSE”

  We’ve been talking about the role of truth, of “the actual,” in fiction. We’ve said that when a story references the world in a way that rings true, this draws the reader in.

  In “Master and Man,” when Tolstoy tells me, “The wind came from the left, insistently blowing over to one side the mane on Mukhorty’s sleek neck and carrying aside even his fluffy tail, which was tied in a simple knot,” I see that horse and feel the bitter wind on my neck and maybe even the cold, hard wood of the bench through my thin, hand-sewn Russian pants.

  So that’s one way a story can be true.

  Here’s another: the sequence of events in it can strike us as truthful. An arrogant landowner insists on taking over the reins on a sled ride through a snowstorm, gets lost, then blames the peasant. I feel, “Yep, that’s how it is in the world sometimes.” The “fundamental accuracy of observation” at work makes me trust the writer and feel engaged.

  This is, roughly speaking, the essence of “realism”: there’s a world out there and the writer makes his story resemble it.

  But as we’re seeing, realism isn’t all that real. The Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy stories we’ve read so far are compressed and exaggerated, with crazy levels of selection and omission and shaping going on in them. (Was there ever a woman as self-abnegating as Olenka? Ever a master as one-noted as Vasili? Do your trips home from town contain as much compressed drama as Marya’s?)

  I once heard the term “consensus reality” used to describe the set of things about the world that we all pretty much agree to be true. Water is blue, birds sing, and so on. And although water is not simply blue and not all birds sing, and to call what some birds do “singing” approximates and undersells what they actually do, agreeing on this consensus view is natural and useful. When I say, “Singing birds were skimming low over an expanse of blue water,” that image is useful if you want to know, roughly, what’s going on down at the lake. When I say, “Look out, a piano is about to fall on your head from above,” the fact that we’ve agreed to call that collection of wood, ivory, and metal a “piano,” and that thing at the end of your neck a “head,” and that direction up there “above” enables you to step out of the way in time, I hope.

  “Realism” exploits this fondness of ours for consensus reality. Things happen roughly as they do in the real world; the mode limits itself to what usually happens, to what’s physically possible.

  But a story can also be truthful if it declines consensus reality—if things happen in it that don’t and could never happen in the real world.

  If I assign you to write a story in which the characters are a cellphone, a pair of gloves, and a fallen leaf, chatting away in a wheelbarrow in a suburban driveway, could that story be truthful? Yes. It could be truthful in the way it reacts to itself, in the way it responds to its premise, in the way it proceeds—by how things change within it, the contours of its internal logic, the relationships between its elements.

  With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premise—by what it does with it.

  If a writer introduces a strange event, then lets the fictive world respond to that event, what we’re really learning about is what we might call the fictive world’s psychological physics. What are the rules there? How do things proceed? A story like that will feel truthful and essential to the extent that the psychological physics of the fictive world are felt to be similar to the psychological physics of our own.

  Which brings us to “The Nose.”

  __

  Ivan Yakovlevich finds a nose in his morning loaf of bread. (“Solid!” he exclaims in our translation; “Firm!” in another, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.) He’s “dumbfounded,” as we would be.

  The nose in the bread is the initial strange event. Now we wait to see how the fictive world (in this case, Ivan and his wife, Praskovya Osipovna) will react to it. That’s where the story’s meaning is going to be made—not in the fact of the nose in the bread but in what the couple does about it in response. This world, where a nose can appear in a loaf of bread, is not our world, but it is a world, and there are going to be rules in that world, and we wait to see what they are.

  Praskovya Osipovna, not dumbfounded, knows exactly how that nose got in there: Ivan, a barber, cut it off the face of a client.

  For an instant, we accept this accusation. A nose is there, one that’s been separated from its face; it’s a “familiar” nose; Ivan is a barber; it’s his own dear wife leveling this charge.

  But it doesn’t quite hold together.

  If I were Ivan, my response would be something like “Sweetie, hang on, think about it. Why would I cut off a client’s nose? And if I did, why would I bring it home? And if I brought it home, why would I put it in the dough, which, come to think of it, wasn’t even made yet last night, when I got here? Also, why didn’t you notice that nose in there, earlier this morning, while you were kneading the dough?”

  Ivan doesn’t say any of this, and in the distance between his reaction and what ours would have been the Gogolian world begins to be made. What Ivan does is immediately accept her (skewed) logic. (If something disastrous has happened, he must be the one who did it.) Then he recognizes the nose as belonging to one of his clients, Kovalyov. (Would I be able to recognize a freestanding nose belonging to someone I see twice a week? The nose of the guy who sits at the front desk of my gym, say? I doubt it. Well, depends on the nose, I guess.)

  So, as I sit there with Ivan and Praskovya on a crude wooden chair I’ve pulled up to that rickety nineteenth-century Russian table, nose-in-a-loaf there in front of us, barely a page into the story, I’m already departing from them. They’re reacting differently to this than I would, jumping to conclusions I can’t endorse, failing to ask questions I’d feel inclined to ask, such as: Wouldn’t Kovalyov have noticed his nose being cut off and have had some feelings about that? What has Kovalyov been doing in the hours since his nose went missing? If Ivan didn’t cut off the nose and bring it home with him, which it seems he didn’t, how did it get here?

  What should they do? What would you do? I’d take a breath and try to figure out how this crazy thing happened. (“Praskovya, was I drunk when I came home? What did I do when I first came in? Let’s go see if my razor’s bloody.”) Concluding that I was innocent, I’d find Kovalyov, return his nose, explain that I had nothing to do with its disappearance.

  But Ivan’s impulse is to “put it in a corner . . . ​let it lie there for a while.” He’ll “take it away” later. But Praskovya wants it out of here now. So, they’re not quarreling over whether to do the irrational, evasive thing (get rid of the nose) but when.

  Praskovya assumes that Ivan is guilty, and he agrees. But what’s he guilty of? He’s afraid that the “police might find the nose in his possession and bring a charge against him.” What charge? We know, and he should, that he hasn’t done anything wrong. And anyway, how would it happen that the police would “find” the nose, there in the house? So, they’re concerned, we feel, about the wrong thing: not that a man has lost his nose but that they might get blamed for it.

  Ivan then does approximately what I would do, I guess, if “get rid of the evidence” was my goal. He wraps the nose in a rag, plans to “shove it under something somewhere . . . ​or just drop it as if by accident and then turn off into a side street.” But he keeps running into people he knows and can’t find the right moment. There’s something . . . off about this. If I imagine myself in, say, New York City, with my gym guy’s nose wrapped in a rag, it seems to me that no matter how many acquaintances I run into, I’m still going to be able to find a way to get rid of it—give it the old drop-and-kick, say, or find a garbage can outside a Starbucks or something. It’s wrapped in a rag, after all, and looks like garbage. There’s something too strict about the conditions Ivan needs to have in place in order to discard the nose; he’s a little paranoid.

  Finally, he succeeds in dropping it, but a policeman immediately sees him and orders him to pick it up. (So, Ivan’s paranoia is justified: this world really is that watchful.)

  Then he takes the nose to St. Isaac’s Bridge and tosses it into the river. There he’s accosted by a second policeman, not for tossing a nose into the river but for the crime of standing on a bridge in a story by Gogol.

  This scene, like the entire story, is infused with what we might call Multiple Superimposed Weirdness Syndrome. Initial weirdness: a nose appears in a loaf of bread. Second-level weirdness: the couple reacts irrationally to the nose’s presence in the bread. Third-level weirdness: because they’ve reacted irrationally, they make an odd plan in response (ditch the nose). Fourth-level weirdness: Ivan executes the plan badly; he can’t get the job done because he approaches it with too much apprehension and because the world he finds out there is inflected with a slight, ornery hostility toward him: a constant flow of acquaintances and a street thick with policemen, or at least two of them in as many pages.

  And there’s one more level of weirdness, one that has to do with how the story’s being told.

  While Ivan’s standing on the bridge there on page 3, we pause for a digression. The narrator has, he confesses, “said nothing about Ivan,” who is “in many ways a respectable man.” But the digression doesn’t do much to convince us of Ivan’s respectability. He’s a drunk, we’re told, and dresses badly, and his hands stink. We’re also told that he’s a “cynic” and, as proof, are offered the fact that when Kovalyov claims that Ivan’s hands stink, Ivan replies with a reasonable question (“Why should they stink?”). In retaliation, Ivan lathers Kovalyov “all over his cheeks and under his nose, and behind his ear, and under his chin”—that is, all the places, approximately, a barber should lather.