"The Nose"

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).

• 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

"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