And The Earth Will Sit On The Moon E-Book

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 243

Beschreibung

Fresh, stylish new translations of Gogol's greatest short stories collected in a beautiful edition 'One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is probably also the funniest' Guardian 'The most morally complete writer: baffled, outraged, reverent, mock-didactic, mocking, all at once. He honours life by feeling no one way about it' GEORGE SAUNDERS No writer has captured the absurdity of the human condition as acutely as Nikolai Gogol. In a lively new translation by Oliver Ready, this collection contains his great classic stories - 'The Overcoat', 'The Nose' and 'Diary of a Madman' - alongside lesser known gems depicting life in the Russian and Ukranian countryside. Together, they reveal Gogol's marvellously skewed perspective, moving between the urban and the rural with painfully sharp humour and scorching satire. Strikingly modern in his depictions of society's shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human soul. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) was born in Ukraine and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work, at first, in various government departments. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), brought him widespread fame, and he went on to write further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. The first part of his great, and only, novel Dead Souls appeared in 1842. In his later life he was increasingly tormented both physically and psychologically and he repeatedly burned his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls. After the final burning in February 1852, he stopped eating and died in great pain ten days later.

Leseprobe

‘A masterful capturer of human failings’

GUARDIAN

‘Much to savour… With its diverse selection of canonical works, Oliver Ready’s engaging volume gives a good sense of Gogol’s range’

TLS

‘The most morally complete writer: baffled, outraged, reverent, mock-didactic, mocking, all at once. He honours life by feeling no one way about it’

GEORGE SAUNDERS

‘No previous translator of these stories has ever captured Gogol’s free-floating lunacy with such fine-grained accuracy’

BORIS DRALYUK

2

AND THE EARTH WILL SIT ON THE MOON

NIKOLAI GOGOL

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY OLIVER READY

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

4

CONTENTS

Title PageTranslator’s IntroductionNote on Ranks the nosediary of a madmanthe overcoatold-world landownersthe carriage Translator’s AcknowledgementsNotesAbout the AuthorsAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press ClassicsAbout the PublisherCopyright

7

Translator’s Introduction

“The world has no place for him!” says the madman, Aksenty Poprishchin, at the culmination of the second story in this book. He is talking about himself in the third person, as “madmen” sometimes do; but he might equally be talking about his creator. Like Poprishchin, Nikolai Gogol was, albeit briefly, a malfunctioning cog in the intimidating bureaucracy of 1830s St Petersburg. And like Poprishchin, Gogol also occupied no well-defined place in city, world or universe. Throughout his adult life he had no fixed home or even country; no settled role in the status-bound system of state “service” that obtained in Tsarist Russia; no significant other, male or female, to anchor him through his long years of itinerancy; no stable place, even, in the spiritual hierarchies that he himself tried to construct in his unfinished epic, Dead Souls, and in the late writings that, in their frequent stridency, presaged his own descent into sickness, compulsive fasting and an agonizing death at the age of forty-two. “Maybe I don’t even know who 8I am,” says Poprishchin, a clerk who would be king. So, too, Gogol, who appears to have spent much of his life asking himself whether he was an instrument of Providence, or an impostor.

Similarly oblique biographical subtexts may be read into all the richly disorientating stories in this volume. To be sure, each can be appreciated and enjoyed without any surrounding context, such is the enduring freshness of their vision, language and form, not to mention their high comedy and strangeness. But only a purist would claim that they cannot be illuminated by some knowledge of their frequently disorientated author.

As a child, Gogol certainly did have a home to call his own: he grew up in a loving family on a modest country estate in the Poltava province of Ukraine, which, as part of the Russian Empire, was officially known as Little Russia (Malorossiya). Nikolai spoke Russian with his parents, but heard plenty of Ukrainian in the house from his nanny and other relatives. His father, Vasily, wrote plays in both languages. The food, history, songs and warmth of traditional Ukraine would remain dear to Nikolai, and seemed, at times, to make him sympathetic towards other nations whose independence had been quashed by Russia; but they also represented a world on the wane, as the elegiacally ironic story ‘Old-World Landowners’ makes distressingly clear. The 9Zaporozhian Cossacks who had thrived in Ukraine in previous centuries would remain an emblem for Gogol of a heroic past and the breadth of the human spirit more generally. But the combined efforts of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had largely muzzled these unruly warriors, while the most heroic exploit of recent times belonged to Russia: its ousting of Napoleon just three years after Gogol’s birth in 1809.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Gogol grew up in “Little Russia” already mentally displaced, his eyes trained on “Great Russia” and its glamorous capital, St Petersburg, the magnet of both power and culture. The proximity of the Gogols to the estate of Dmitry Troshchinsky, twice a minister under Alexander I and their effective patron, could only have reinforced this sense. So it was that in the winter of 1828, after seven years in a boarding school some 150 miles from home—his first, very painful dislocation—Gogol set out for St Petersburg, filled with inchoate dreams of serving the state and achieving glory.

Disillusion set in instantly and lastingly. The letters he wrote to his now widowed mother, shortly after arriving, provide the most eloquent introduction to the first three stories of this volume, all set in St Petersburg. Gogol was notoriously unreliable, as a man and correspondent, but these impressions pulse with unfeigned intensity of feeling:10

I will add that I did not find Petersburg to be at all as I expected; I imagined it to be far more beautiful and majestic, and the rumours which others have spread about it are also false. (3rd January 1829)

Then, more expansively, nearly four months later:

Petersburg is not remotely like other European capitals or Moscow. As a rule, every capital is characterized by its people, who leave upon it the stamp of nationality, but no character has been stamped on Petersburg: the foreigners who have settled here have made themselves at home and are not remotely like foreigners, while the Russians, in turn, have made themselves foreign and become neither one thing nor the other. There is an extraordinary silence here; no spirit shines in the people; it’s all government clerks and officials nattering on about their Departments and Boards; everything has been crushed and besmirched in the pointless, worthless labour in which their lives are fruitlessly expended. It’s very amusing to see these people on the streets and pavements; they can be so absorbed in their thoughts that when you draw level with them you can hear them arguing and chatting with themselves, sometimes with the addition of physical jerks and gesticulations. (30th April 1829)

11In such letters Gogol was, no doubt, projecting his own personal trauma at finding himself, a middle-ranking provincial, lost and unwanted in St Petersburg, and things did not improve very quickly: it took him a year to find employment in the civil service, which he detested as much as he must have expected. After eighteen months or so serving in various departments, he tried his hand in other fields, such as acting and teaching. A genius, after all, can flourish in any sphere; but so, as Gogol would show in his great play The Inspector General, can an impostor, if only for a while.

Projection or otherwise, the St Petersburg described above is the matrix for Gogol’s writing: an inauthentic, mock-European, faux-modern city in which regalia and rank mask the underlying reality, visible only to the dislocated Gogol, that nothing is as it should be or as it seems. It is a place where the slick and the educated merely affect piety and no longer believe in the devil, who haunts Gogol’s Petersburg incognito. Above all, it is a place of lack, of absence, not “the window onto Europe” conceived by Peter the Great (to cite Alexander Pushkin’s epic poem The Bronze Horseman), but the portal to the negative universe of Gogol’s subsequent writing. It was St Petersburg that showed Gogol what human beings become when they lose contact with the aesthetic and spiritual potential that had once given life meaning 12and scale—the same human beings whom Gogol would try, like Sisyphus, to roll back up the mountain of Dead Souls.

For a while, Gogol’s disillusionment proved highly productive, releasing a stream of fiction and drama that would allow him, on Pushkin’s death in 1837, to be recognized as Russia’s premier living writer. After the disaster of his first publication, a Romantic idyll in verse, he made his breakthrough with two volumes of stories set in Ukraine, rich in folklore, prose poetry and the supernatural. The Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–32), as they were called, won high praise from Pushkin and continue to enchant. They are most effective, however, when read en masse. Moreover, it was only when Gogol integrated the shock of St Petersburg into his writing that he became a satirist of genius, while also managing to bring greater artistic control to the humour, playful storytelling and mastery of voice already evident in the Dikanka tales.

This collection begins, then, with Gogol’s first Petersburg story, ‘The Nose’, which was written in 1832 but deemed too “vulgar, dirty and trivial” by the editors to whom it was sent (it was later rescued by Pushkin and published in his journal, The Contemporary). No reader can help registering the missing nose of the story as the phallic symbol it so patently is; the nineteenth-century 13and pre-Freudian reader would have been quicker still to associate the protagonist’s plight with saddle nose, a very real consequence of syphilis (common diseases of this kind may be one reason why the hypochondriac Gogol appears to have been largely celibate, leaving aside his disputed sexual preferences). Initially, the story was to be called ‘Son’ (‘A Dream’), and to end as that title would suggest. Gogol’s decision to change the ending and invert the title from ‘Son’ to ‘Nos’ was a masterstroke. It also opened the path to the “fantastical realism” that, in its merging of the empirical and supernatural, would bring such fame to Gogol’s first St Petersburg descendant, Dostoevsky, and, in the twentieth century, to Mikhail Bulgakov, also born in Ukraine.

‘The Nose’ was followed in fairly quick succession by another exploration of the unseemly and the fantastic al, ‘Diary of a Madman’ (1834), and two stories, not included here, that are connected by Gogol’s lifelong fascination with the visual arts and the responsibilities of the artist in general: ‘Nevsky Prospect’ and ‘The Portrait’. These two tales, though undeniably important and intermittently brilliant, stand in this reader’s estimation one or two notches lower than the other Petersburg stories, perhaps because of the difficulty Gogol had in convincingly inhabiting the minds of more or less “normal” characters. ‘The Overcoat’, Gogol’s 14single most celebrated story, was conceived several years later and completed in 1842, when he had already been based in Rome for several years. Beneath the garrulous, grotesquely amusing patter of the untrustworthy narrator, it also contains signs of Gogol’s reorientation in these years towards more solemn and religious concerns.

Alongside the Petersburg stories, Gogol composed a further cycle of tales set in Ukraine and entitled Mirgorod. It is represented here by ‘Old-World Landowners’ (1835), in which, as in ‘The Overcoat’, the narrator is arguably the most important—and certainly most ambiguous—character. My selection ends with the shortest and lesser-known story of the five, ‘The Carriage’ (1836), whose evocation of the sleepy Russian south points the way to Dead Souls. It is also a comic masterpiece in its own right. For Leo Tolstoy, writing seventy-five years later, it was “the height of perfection in its kind”, while Anton Chekhov, who took a more pragmatic view of the value of art than Gogol, was moved to comment, “How direct and powerful Gogol is—and what an artist! His ‘Carriage’ alone is worth two hundred thousand roubles. Pure ecstasy and nothing more!”

In a career as short and brilliant as Gogol’s, every story may be deemed essential, not least his two novella-length tales, one melodramatically serious, one melancholically hilarious: the Cossack epic ‘Taras 15Bulba’ and the ‘Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’ (both from Mirgorod). It was, therefore, a relief to discover, upon translating the five stories included here, that they matched precisely the word count initially suggested by the publisher: a numerological coincidence that supplies aptly mystical support for the possibility that this selection may indeed offer the quintessence of Gogol’s achievement in the short-story form.16

17

Note on Ranks

Without a brief explanation of the “Table of Ranks”, by which the Russian nobility was classified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the first three stories in this volume, all set among civil servants in St Petersburg, are likely to seem even stranger than they already are. Instituted in 1722 by Peter the Great with the intention, at least in part, to offer some scope for social mobility, the Table became by Gogol’s time the framework of a very hierarchical, regimented society, in which one’s rank and the specific etiquette appropriate to it (not least in matters of dress) risked determining a person’s entire identity. The simplified table given below lists in descending order the civilian ranks, obtained through government service, that are frequently mentioned in Gogol’s stories; each also had its parallel rank in the Court and in the army, which was considered a more prestigious form of service in the highly militarized reign (1825–55) of Nicholas I. Only ranks from Collegiate Assessor upwards conferred 18hereditary nobility, hence the misfortune of remaining an “eternal Titular Counsellor”.

ChancellorActual Privy CounsellorPrivy CounsellorActual State CounsellorState CounsellorCollegiate CounsellorCourt CounsellorCollegiate AssessorTitular CounsellorCollegiate SecretaryNaval SecretaryGubernatorial SecretaryProvincial SecretaryCollegiate Registrar

19

THE NOSE

I

A  most peculiar incident occurred in St Petersburg on the twenty-fifth of March. The barber Ivan Yakovlevich (only his first name and patronymic have been preserved: even his shop sign, which depicts a gentleman with a lathered cheek and the words We Also Let Blood, says nothing about his surname), the barber Ivan Yakovlevich, who lives on Voznesensky Prospect, woke quite early and caught the smell of hot bread. Lifting himself up a little in bed, he saw his spouse, quite a worthy lady who was very fond of coffee, taking some freshly baked loaves out of the stove.

“I won’t have any coffee today, Praskovya Osipovna,” Ivan Yakovlevich said. “Today I fancy some warm bread and onion.”

(In fact, Ivan Yakovlevich would have liked both coffee and bread, but he knew that demanding two 20things at once was out of the question: Praskovya Osipovna strongly disapproved of all such whims.)

“More fool him,” his spouse thought to herself. “Means an extra cup for me.” And she chucked a loaf onto the table.

Donning his tailcoat over his nightshirt to make himself decent, Ivan Yakovlevich sat down at the table, sprinkled some salt, peeled two onions, picked up a knife and, making a serious face, addressed the loaf. After cutting it in two equal halves, he was surprised to spot something white inside. Ivan Yakovlevich poked about gingerly with the knife and had a feel with his finger. “Pretty firm!” he said to himself. “What could it be?”

He stuck his fingers in and pulled out… a nose! Ivan Yakovlevich’s arms fell to his sides; he began rubbing his eyes and feeling the thing: a nose, most definitely a nose! And not just any old nose, but a nose he knew. Ivan Yakovlevich’s face was a picture of horror. But this horror was nothing compared to the rage that had overcome his spouse.

“How did you manage to slice off a nose, you brute?” she yelled at him. “Swindler! Drunkard! I’ll report you to the police myself. What a piece of work! I’ve had at least three of your customers tell me that you tug on noses so hard when shaving that they very nearly fall off.”21

But Ivan Yakovlevich was rigid with terror. The nose, he had realized, belonged to none other than Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, whom he shaved every Wednesday and Sunday.

“Wait, Praskovya Osipovna! I’ll wrap it in a rag and leave it in the corner for a bit, then take it away later.”

“Not on your life! Think I’d let a sliced-off nose take up space in my home? You dried-up old rusk! Wiping blades on your strop is all you’re good for. Soon you won’t be able to carry out your duty at all, you strumpet, scoundrel! Think I’ll stick up for you when the police come knocking? A thick, filthy plank, that’s all you are! Get rid of it! Now! Anywhere you like! So long as I never see hide nor hair of it again!”

Ivan Yakovlevich looked more dead than alive. He was thinking and thinking—and didn’t know what to think.

“Devil knows how this happened,” he said at long last, scratching the back of his ear. “Maybe I was drunk when I got back last night? Can’t say for sure. The whole thing seems impossible: bread is something you bake, but no one bakes noses. I can’t get my head round it!…”

Ivan Yakovlevich fell silent. The thought of the police finding the nose in his possession and charging 22him had reduced him to a complete stupor. He was already picturing a scarlet collar with beautiful silver embroidery, a sword… and began trembling all over. Eventually, though, he grabbed his tatty underclothes and boots, got dressed and, with Praskovya Osipovna’s unpleasant warnings ringing in his ears, wrapped the nose up in a rag and went out.

He wanted to shove it behind one of the granite stones at the entrance to a courtyard, or just drop it somewhere, as if by accident, then turn off down a side street. But he kept bumping into people he knew, who asked him one question after another: “Where are you off to?”; “Who are you shaving at this time of day?”—and Ivan Yakovlevich just couldn’t find the right moment. Eventually he did manage to drop the thing, but a policeman, who was standing some way off, pointed to the bundle with his halberd and said, “Pick it up! Look, you dropped something!” So Ivan Yakovlevich had to pick the nose up and hide it in his pocket. He was beginning to despair, not least because the streets kept filling up with people as the shops and stalls started to open.

He decided to make for St Isaac’s Bridge: perhaps he could throw it into the Neva?… But I must apologize for having said nothing about Ivan Yakovlevich, a worthy man in many regards.23

Ivan Yakovlevich, like any decent Russian tradesman, was a terrible drinker. And although he shaved other people’s chins day in, day out, his own was permanently unshaven. Ivan Yakovlevich’s tailcoat (for Ivan Yakovlevich never wore frock coats) was piebald, by which I mean it was black but dappled with brownish-yellow and grey; the collar was greasy and three buttons were missing, leaving only threads. Ivan Yakovlevich couldn’t care less about such things and whenever Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov told him, as he usually did while being shaved, “Your hands, Ivan Yakovlevich, always stink!” Ivan Yakovlevich would ask, “But why should they stink?” to which the Collegiate Assessor would reply, “I don’t know, my friend, but they stink,” and Ivan Yakovlevich, after taking a pinch of snuff, would get him back by lathering up the Collegiate Assessor’s cheek, and the skin just under his nose, and behind his ear, and beneath his chin—in short, wherever the fancy took him.

This worthy citizen was already standing on St Isaac’s Bridge. He had a good look around then leant over the railings, as if to see how many fish were swimming beneath the bridge, and furtively threw the rag and nose into the water. Ivan Yakovlevich suddenly felt twenty stone lighter; he even grinned. Instead of going off to shave civil servants’ chins, he 24made straight for an establishment called “Food and Tea” to ask for a glass of punch, when he suddenly noticed a District Police Inspector standing at the end of the bridge; he had a noble look about him, with his broad whiskers, cocked hat and sword. Ivan Yakovlevich froze. Meanwhile, the Inspector was beckoning to him with his finger and saying, “Now come over here, my friend!”

Ivan Yakovlevich, who knew the routine, immediately doffed his cap, briskly walked over and said, “Good day, Your Honour!”

“Never mind that, just tell me: what were you doing over there on the bridge?”

“I was on my way to shave my next customer, honest, and I just wanted to see how fast the river was flowing.”

“Rubbish! That won’t get you off the hook. Answer the question!”

“Sir, I’m at your service twice, even three times a week. Just say the word!”

“No, my friend, you’ll have to do better than that! I’ve got three barbers shaving me, and they count themselves lucky to do so. Just tell me: what were you up to over there?”

Ivan Yakovlevich went pale… But here the incident becomes entirely shrouded in fog, and what happened next is anyone’s guess.25

II

Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov woke rather early and his lips went “Brrr”, as they always did when he woke up, even though he himself could not have told you why. Kovalyov stretched and asked for the small mirror from the table. He wanted to have a look at the spot that had come out on his nose the previous evening; but in the place where his nose should have been he saw, to his utter astonishment, a completely smooth space! Taking fright, Kovalyov demanded some water and rubbed his eyes with a towel: definitely no nose! He began feeling himself to see whether he was still asleep: didn’t seem to be. Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov jumped out of bed and tried to pull himself together: no nose!… He called for his clothes right away and rushed off to see the Chief of Police.

Meanwhile we really must say something about Kovalyov, so that the reader can see what kind of Collegiate Assessor he was. Collegiate Assessors who attain their rank by means of academic diplomas cannot be compared to those who have earned their title on government service in the Caucasus. They are chalk and cheese. Academic Collegiate Assessors… But Russia is such a peculiar land that whatever you say about one Collegiate Assessor will inevitably be taken to heart 26by all Collegiate Assessors from Riga to Kamchatka. The same goes for all other ranks and titles. Kovalyov was a Collegiate Assessor of the Caucasian variety. He had held this rank for only two years, which was why he couldn’t forget it for a single minute; and to give himself an air of greater nobility and gravity, he would never refer to himself as Collegiate Assessor, but always as Major.1 “Now listen, dearie,” he would typically say when meeting a woman selling shirt fronts in the street, “you come and see me at home. My apartment is on Sadovaya. Just ask: does Major Kovalyov live here? Anyone will show you the way.” If the woman also happened to be pretty, he would give her a secret instruction as well: “Ask for Major Kovalyov’s apartment, my lovely.” And that’s why we will also call him Major from now on.

Major Kovalyov was in the habit of taking a stroll every day along Nevsky Prospect. The collar of his shirt front was always exceptionally clean and well starched. His whiskers were of the style that can still be found to this day among regional and district land surveyors, among architects and regimental doctors, not to mention various guardians of the peace, and in fact all men whose cheeks are full and ruddy and who are a dab hand at Boston:2 they stretch across the very middle of the cheek, these whiskers, right up to the nose. 27Major Kovalyov carried on his person a great many carnelian seals, some engraved with crests, others with the words Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, and so on. Major Kovalyov had come to St Petersburg on business; to be more precise, he was seeking a place befitting his rank: ideally, a vice-governorship—if not, a managerial position in a prominent department. Major Kovalyov wasn’t against getting married, either, but only if the bride had a dowry of two hundred thousand roubles. So now the reader can judge for himself the state that this Major must have been in when, in the place of his moderate and not unattractive nose, he saw an idiotic space that was flat and smooth.

To top it all, there wasn’t a single cabby to be found on the street, so he had to walk all wrapped up in his cloak, covering his face with a handkerchief as if he had a nosebleed. “Maybe I just imagined it: how can a nose just disappear?” he wondered, stepping into a cafe-patisserie just so that he could look at himself in a mirror. Fortunately, the patisserie was empty; waiters were sweeping the floors and arranging the tables; some, still half asleep, were carrying hot pastries on trays; yesterday’s coffee-stained newspapers were strewn over tables and chairs. “Thank God it’s empty,” he said. “Now I can have a proper look.” He walked timidly up to the mirror and took one glance. “Ugh, call that 28a face?” he said, spitting. “The devil knows what it is. If only I had something, anything there, if I can’t have a nose!…”

Biting his lip in vexation, he left the patisserie and resolved, against his usual practice, not to look or smile at anyone. Suddenly he was stopped in his tracks outside a certain house. An inexplicable phenomenon occurred right before his eyes: a carriage drew up before the front entrance, its doors opened and, ducking his head, a gentleman in uniform sprang out of it and ran up the steps. Picture Kovalyov’s horror and sheer astonishment when he realized that this was his very own nose! The world seemed to turn upside down at the sight of this extraordinary spectacle. He felt he could barely stay on his feet but he resolved, come what may, to wait until the gentleman returned to the carriage; he was shaking feverishly. Two minutes later the nose did indeed come back out. His uniform boasted gold embroidery and a tall standing collar; he was wearing suede trousers, with a sword down one side. One could infer from his plumed hat that he held the rank of State Counsellor. Indeed, everything suggested that he was off to pay someone a visit. After glancing in both directions, he yelled “Bring it over!” to the coachman, took his seat and departed.

Poor Kovalyov almost went out of his mind. He didn’t know how to even think about such an extraordinary 29thing. And really, how was it possible that the nose which had been on his face only yesterday and could neither ride nor walk was now wearing a uniform! He ran after the carriage, which, thank goodness, had not got very far, having drawn up by the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan.3

He hurried over to the cathedral, picked his way through the row of old beggarwomen whose faces were all bound up with scarves except for two slits for the eyes—the same old women he used to ridicule—and entered the church. There were only a few worshippers inside, and they were all standing by the entrance. Kovalyov was too distraught to pray and he scanned every nook for the gentleman. Eventually he spotted him standing off to one side. The nose had hidden his entire face in his tall collar and was praying with an expression of the most pious devotion.

“How to approach him?” Kovalyov wondered. “Everything about him—his uniform, his hat—says State Counsellor. The devil knows what I should do!”

Moving closer, he began clearing his throat; but the nose remained fixed in his attitude of devotion, making one low bow after another.

“Sir…” Kovalyov began, steeling himself as best he could. “Sir…”

“Can I help you?” the nose replied, turning round.30

“I find this rather strange, sir… I would have thought… you would know your place. And then where do I find you? In a church, of all places. Don’t you think…”

“Forgive me, but I am unable to grasp your meaning… Explain yourself.”

“How can I do that?” Kovalyov wondered and, plucking up courage, began: “I am, by the way… well, I’m a Major. It is unseemly for me to go around without a nose, don’t you think? A woman sitting on Voskresensky Bridge and selling peeled oranges for a living can do without a nose, but I, with my hopes for… not to mention the ladies of my acquaintance: Mrs State Counsellor Chekhtaryova and others… Well, judge for yourself… I don’t know what else to say, sir.” (Here Kovalyov shrugged his shoulders.) “Forgive me… but if one is to view the matter in accordance with the rules of duty and honour… well, I’m sure you understand very well…”

“I most certainly do not,” the nose replied. “Express yourself more clearly.”

“Sir…” said Kovalyov, with all the dignity he could muster. “I do not know how to take your words… This entire business, it would seem, could hardly be any clearer… Or do you want… But you’re my own nose!”31

The nose looked at the Major, and his brow darkened.

“You are mistaken, sir. I am my own man. Moreover, a close relationship between us is out of the question. To judge by the buttons on your uniform, you must be employed in the Senate or, at any rate, in the Ministry of Justice. While I serve in the educational sphere.”

On saying this, the nose turned away and continued praying.