Nos, Nikolai Gogol - William Woodin Rowe (essay date 1976)
William Woodin Rowe (essay date 1976)
SOURCE: Rowe, William Woodin. “Tales.” In Through Gogol's Looking Glass: Reverse Vision, False Focus, and Precarious Logic, pp. 100–06. New York: New York University Press, 1976.
[In the following excerpt, Rowe asserts that “The Nose” represents a reversal of the realms of waking and sleeping, reality and dream.]
Viktor Vinogradov has extensively related this strange story to what he terms the “nosology” that pervaded the literary and non-literary atmosphere of the 1820s and 1830s.1 He has also related “The Nose” to mentions of noses in many of Gogol's other writings, including a letter in which Gogol confused “a furious desire” to be transformed into a single huge nose, the better to imbibe the fragrances of spring.2
In terms of the present study, “The Nose” may be viewed as a reversal of waking and sleeping worlds: both the drunken barber and...
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