The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol

  Beyond the gates were two windmills. Behind the house stretched the gardens, and through the tops of the trees all you could see were the dark chimney tops of the huts that were hidden in the thick green foliage. The whole hamlet was situated on the broad and even ledge of a hill. From the north, the steep hill shielded it all, and its base ended right at the farmyard. When you looked at the hill from below, it seemed even steeper, and on its high top the irregular stalks of scraggly weeds stuck out here and there and showed black against the bright sky. The hill’s bare, clayey appearance inspired a feeling of despondency.12 It was all pitted by rain gullies and ruts. On its steep slope two huts stuck up in two places. Over one of them spread the branches of a broad apple tree, supported at its roots by small stakes with dirt mounded up on them. Apples blown down by the wind came rolling down all the way to the master’s yard. A road came winding down from the very top of the hill, and as it descended it went past the farmyard into the hamlet. When the Philosopher measured its terrible steepness and recalled their journey of the night before, he decided that either the master had the most intelligent horses ever, or the Cossacks had the strongest heads ever, if in their drunken state they had managed not to go flying head over heels along with their enormous carriage and baggage. The Philosopher was standing on the highest point in the yard, and when he turned around and looked in the other direction, he saw something completely different. The hamlet rolled down the slope to a plain. Boundless meadows opened up into distant space; their bright greenness got darker the farther away they were, and whole strings of hamlets showed dark blue in the distance, although they were more than fifteen miles away. To the right of these meadows stretched a line of hills, and off in the distance the strip of the Dnieper River shimmered darkly.

  “Oh, what a beautiful place!” the Philosopher said. “I’d love to live here, fish in the Dnieper and in the ponds, go hunting with snares or a gun for little bustards and snipe! Come to think, I bet there are quite a few great bustards in these meadows too. You could dry a ton of fruit and sell it in the city, or even better, make vodka out of it, because fruit vodka is incomparably better than grain vodka. And it wouldn’t hurt to start thinking about how to slip away from here.”

  He spied out a little path beyond the wattle fence, completely covered with overgrown weeds. He stepped onto it absentmindedly, thinking that he’d first take a little stroll, and then on the quiet, between the huts, he’d light out running into the fields, when suddenly he felt a firm hand on his shoulder.

  Behind him stood that same old Cossack who yesterday had so bitterly mourned the deaths of his father and mother and grieved his own loneliness.

  “Mister Philosopher, you’re wrong to think you’re going to take to your heels from the farmstead!” he said. “This isn’t the kind of establishment from which you can escape. The roads are no good for traveling on foot. You’d better go see the master. He’s long been waiting for you in the parlor.”

  “Let’s go! What do you mean… I’d be happy to,” the Philosopher said and went along with the Cossack.

  The lieutenant, an aged man, with a gray mustache and an expression of gloomy sadness, was sitting at a table in the parlor, leaning his head on both hands. He was about fifty years old, but the deep despondency on his face and a kind of pale, gaunt color showed that his soul had been killed and destroyed suddenly, in a single moment, and all his former gaiety and raucous life had disappeared forever. When Khoma came in with the old Cossack, he removed one hand and slightly nodded in response to their low bows.

  Khoma and the Cossack stood respectfully by the door.

  “Who are you, and where are you from, and what is your rank, my good man?” the lieutenant said, neither kindly nor sternly.

  “I am a bursak, the Philosopher Khoma Brut.”

  “And who was your father?”

  “I don’t know, noble sir.”

  “And your mother?”

  “I don’t know who my mother was either. According to sound reasoning, I must have had a mother, of course; but who she was, and where she was from, and when she lived—honest to God, my lord, I do not know.”

  The lieutenant was silent for a moment and seemed to have fallen into thought.

  “But how did you meet my daughter?”

  “I never met her, noble sir, honest to God, never. I’ve never had any dealings with pannochkas as long as I’ve lived. God keep them away from me, let me say that instead of a dirty word.”

  “But why then did she ask by name for you to read, and not someone else?”

  The Philosopher shrugged: “God knows how to explain it. It’s a well-known fact that noble people sometimes want things that the most literate person can’t figure out. Even the proverb says, ‘The devil has to jump when the lord gives him an order!’ ”

  “Are you perhaps lying to me, Mister Philosopher?”

  “May thunder strike me down on this very spot if I’m lying,”

  “If you had only lived just a tiny minute more,” the lieutenant said sadly, “then I would probably have found out everything. ‘Don’t let anyone read over me, Daddy, but send immediately to the Kyiv seminary and have them bring the bursak Khoma Brut. Let him pray for three nights for my sinful soul. He knows…’ But what he knows, I did not hear. That’s all the darling girl was able to say, then she died. You, good man, are probably well known for your holy life and your charitable works, and perhaps she heard about you.”

  “Who, me?” the bursak said, stepping back in amazement. “My holy life?” he said, looking right into the lieutenant’s eyes. “God be with you, sir! What are you talking about! Although it might be indecent to mention it, I went to see the baker-woman right before Maundy Thursday.”13

  “Hmmm… well, she must have had some reason for naming you. You must begin your task this very day.”

  “In answer to that I would say to your lordship that of course any person who is learned in the Holy Scripture might be able to do this in some degree… but propriety demands a deacon or at least a lector for this task. They are sensible people and know how to do all this, while I… And I don’t have the right kind of voice, and I myself am the devil knows what. I don’t look like anything at all.”

  “You can say whatever you like, but I am going to carry out everything that my darling girl left me to do as her dying will, without sparing myself. And if you read the prayers over her in a proper fashion for the next three nights, I will reward you; if not—I wouldn’t advise the devil himself to get me angry.”

  The lieutenant uttered these last words so firmly that the Philosopher fully understood their meaning.

  “Come with me!” the lieutenant said.

  They went out into the entryway. The lieutenant opened the door into another parlor that was opposite the first. The Philosopher stopped for a moment in the entryway to blow his nose and then stepped across the threshold with a kind of inexplicable terror. The floor was carpeted in red nankeen cloth. In the corner under the icons, the body of the dead young woman lay on a high table, on a dark-blue velvet blanket trimmed with golden fringe and tassels. Tall wax tapers with guelder-roses wound around them stood at the foot and head of the table, shedding their dull light, which was lost in the light of the sun. The face of the dead woman was screened from him by the inconsolable father, who sat before her with his back turned toward the door. The Philosopher was struck by the words he heard: “My dearest, darling daughter, I don’t regret the fact that you have left the earth in the flower of your years, without living out your appointed time, to my great sadness and grief. My little sweetheart, I do not regret the fact that I do not know who my mortal enemy is, the man who caused your death. And if I knew who it was who could even think of offending you or even saying something unpleasant about you, I swear to God, he would no longer see his children, if he’s as old as I am; nor his father and mother, if he is still in the prime of life, and his body would be cast out to be eaten by birds and the beasts of the steppe. But my da
rling wild marigold, my little quail, my little star, my sorrow is that I must live out the rest of my life without any joy, wiping away with the hem of my shirt the constant tears flowing from my old eyes, while my enemy will be making merry and secretly laughing at the feeble old man…”

  He stopped because of a burst of grief that resolved into a whole flood of tears.

  The Philosopher was moved by such inconsolable sadness. He coughed and made a little sound to clear his throat.

  The lieutenant turned around and pointed him to a place at the head of the dead woman, in front of a small lectern with books on it.

  “I’ll somehow manage to work through the three nights,” the Philosopher thought, “and his lordship will fill both my pockets with clean banknotes for it.”

  He came closer, cleared his throat again, and started to read, not paying any attention to anything else and resolving not to look at the face of the dead woman. A deep silence reigned. He noticed that the lieutenant went out. Khoma slowly turned his head to look at the dead woman and…

  A shiver went through his veins: Before him lay a beauty the likes of which had never been seen on earth. It seemed that never before had facial features been formed in such a sharply defined and at the same time harmonious beauty. She lay as if still alive. Her beautiful brow, tender as snow or silver, seemed to be thinking; her fine, even eyebrows, like night in the middle of a sunny day, rose proudly over her closed eyes, and her eyelashes lay like arrows on her cheeks, which glowed with the fire of secret desires; her lips were rubies ready to break out into a grin… But he saw something terrifyingly piercing in those very features. He felt his soul begin to ache painfully, as if suddenly in the middle of a whirlwind of carousing and a madly dancing crowd someone had struck up a song about an oppressed people.14 The rubies of her lips seemed to be stuck to his very heart by blood. Suddenly something terrifyingly familiar appeared in her face.

  “The witch!” he screamed in a voice not his own, moved his eyes away, turned all pale, and started to read his prayers.

  It was the same witch that he had killed.

  When the sun started to go down, they carried the dead woman to the church. The Philosopher supported the black funereal coffin with one shoulder and felt something on that shoulder that was as cold as ice. The lieutenant himself walked in front, carrying the right side of the dead woman’s cramped house with his arm. The wooden church, all blackened, covered with green moss, with three cone-shaped domes, stood dejectedly almost on the edge of the village. One could see that no services had been held in it for a long time. There were candles lit in front of almost every icon. They put the coffin in the middle, right opposite the altar. The old lieutenant kissed the dead woman once more, prostrated himself, and left along with the pallbearers. He gave an order to feed the Philosopher well and then bring him to the church after supper. When they came into the kitchen, all the pallbearers started to warm their hands at the stove, which is what Little Russians usually do after they’ve seen a corpse.

  The hunger that the Philosopher had started to feel at that time caused him to forget the dead woman completely for a few minutes. Soon all the servants gradually gathered in the kitchen. The kitchen in the lieutenant’s home was something like a club where everyone who lived in the farmstead thronged, including the dogs who came, with their tails wagging, up to the very door to get bones and slops. No matter where a person had been sent and no matter what their errand, they would always stop in at the kitchen first in order to rest a moment on the bench and smoke a pipe. All the bachelors who lived in the house, sporting their Cossack caftans, would lie here almost all day on a bench, under a bench, on the stove—in short, wherever they could find a comfortable place for lying around. Plus they were always forgetting something in the kitchen—either a cap, or a whip to ward off strange dogs, or something like that. But the largest gathering would be at suppertime, when the horse-wrangler, who had managed to drive his horses into the paddock, and the drover, who had brought the cows in to be milked, and all those people one didn’t see during the day, would come. Over supper even the most reticent tongues would be overcome by chatter. They would talk about everything: about who had had new trousers made, and what can be found in the middle of the earth, and who had seen a wolf. There were a lot of specialists in the bon mot, who are always in abundance among the Little Russians.

  The Philosopher sat down with the others in a big circle in the fresh air in front of the threshold to the kitchen. Soon a peasant woman in a red coif popped out of the door, holding a hot crock full of dumplings in both hands, and put it down in the middle of the circle of people waiting for their supper. Each one took a wooden spoon out of his pocket, except for those who didn’t have one, who got out sharp-pointed sticks they could skewer the dumplings with. As soon as their mouths started to move a little more slowly and the wolfish hunger of the whole gathering had been somewhat sated, many of them started to converse. Naturally the conversation turned to the dead woman.

  “Is it true,” said one young shepherd, who had put so many buttons and brass plates on the leather shoulder belt he carried his pipe on that it looked like a petty tradeswoman’s shop, “is it true that the pannochka, not to speak ill of the dead, but is it true she had dealings with the Evil One?”

  “Who? The pannochka?” said Dorosh, with whom our Philosopher was already acquainted. “She was a downright witch! I swear she was a witch!”

  “That’s enough, Dorosh!” said the man who had been so eager to console people when they were on the road. “It’s none of our business, let it go. There’s no need to talk about that.”

  But Dorosh was in no mood to stay silent. He had just gone down to the wine cellar with the steward on some important errand, and after bending over two or three barrels he had come out quite happy and talking nonstop.

  “What do you want? You want me to keep silent?” he said. “Why, she took a ride on my back! Honest to God, she did!”

  “Say, old fellow,” said the young shepherd with the buttons, “are there some kind of markings you can tell a witch by?”

  “No,” Dorosh answered. “You can’t tell, even if you read all the Psalters, you won’t be able to tell.”

  “Yes, you can, Dorosh. Don’t say that,” said the consoler. “God has given everyone a particular custom. People who know their stuff say that a witch has a tiny little tail.”

  “If a woman is old, then she’s a witch,” the gray-haired Cossack said coolly.

  “Oh, you’re fine ones!” caught up the woman, who was pouring fresh dumplings into the crock that had been emptied out, “you’re regular fat old castrated hogs.”

  A smile of pleasure appeared on the lips of the old Cossack, whose name was Yavtukh (nickname Hair-Mat), because he saw that his words had really hit home with the old woman, and the cattle drover gave such a loud laugh it was as if two bulls standing face to face had started bellowing at the same time.15

  The conversation they had started aroused an insurmountable desire and curiosity in the Philosopher to find out in more detail about the lieutenant’s dead daughter. So he tried to bring the conversation back to the previous topic by addressing his neighbor with the following words: “I would like to ask why this whole estate of people sitting over supper considers the pannochka to be a witch? Did she really do any evil to anyone or torment anyone?”

  “All kinds of things happened,” answered one of the people sitting there, whose face was so smooth it had an uncanny resemblance to a spade.

  “Who doesn’t remember Mikita the master of hounds, or the one…”

  “What about Mikita the master of hounds?” asked the Philosopher.

  “Wait! I’ll tell him about Mikita the master of hounds,” said Dorosh.

  “I’ll tell about Mikita,” the horse-wrangler answered, “he was my best friend.”16

  “I’ll tell about Mikita,” said Spirid.

  “Let him, let Spirid tell it!” the crowd shouted.

  Spirid
began: “You didn’t know Mikita, Mister Philosopher Khoma. Oh, what a rare person he was! He knew each dog as if it were his own father. Our present master of hounds Mikola, who’s sitting right over there, can’t hold a candle to him. Although he knows his business, in comparison to Mikita he’s trash, garbage.”

  “You’re telling it well, really well!” Dorosh said, nodding with approval.

  Spirid continued: “He’d see a hare before you could wipe the snuff from your nose. He’d whistle: ‘Come on, Bandit, come on, Speedy!’ and he’d be riding his horse at full speed himself—and you couldn’t tell who would overtake who first: would he outrun the dog or the dog outrun him. He’d swill down a quart of moonshine as if it was nothing. He was a great master of hounds! But just recently he started constantly looking at the pannochka. Whether he’d fallen in love with her or she’d bewitched him, he was just ruined, he became just like a woman; he became the devil knows what; ugh! it’s indecent even to say.”

  “He’s telling it well,” said Dorosh.

  “As soon as the pannochka would look at him he’d drop the reins, he’d call Bandit Hound-Dog, he’d stumble, and who knows what else he’d do. Once the pannochka came to the stable where he was grooming his horse. ‘Come on, Mikitka,’ she said, ‘let me put my little leg on you.’ And like a fool he was happy about it. He said, ‘Don’t just put your little leg on me, but mount on top of me yourself.’ The pannochka raised her little leg, and as soon as he saw her bare, plump, white leg, they say he was dazed by a spell. The fool bent his back, and taking hold of her bare legs with both hands, he started galloping like a horse all over the field, and he couldn’t say all the places they went; but he came back hardly alive, and from that time he just dried up like a wood chip, and one day when they came to the stable, they found instead of him just a pile of ashes and an empty bucket: He had burned right up, all by himself. And he was the sort of master of hounds that you can’t find in the whole world.”