Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 St. Petersburg everyday life, familiar to the writer's contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical approaches to the story in Gogol scholarship.
Trade Review“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
Table of Contents
- Note on Translation and Transliteration
- Introduction
- Н. В. Гоголь «Нос»: The Text in Russian
- ANNOTATIONS TO THE RUSSIAN TEXT
- I
- II
- III
- HOW "THE NOSE" IS MADE: Language-Game as the Engine of the Plot
- INTERPRETATIONS
- 1. Joke, Jest, Farce, 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"
- 8. Shostakovich's Opera "The Nose"
- 9. A Play with Reality: "The Nose," Kafka, and Dalí
- Instead of a Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography
