The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol

  So passed four fiery years of his life—four years that were exceedingly significant for the youth—and toward the end of them many things appeared in a different form than they had before. He became disenchanted with many things. Paris itself, which eternally draws foreigners to it, the eternal passion of the Parisians, seemed to him much, much different than it had before. He saw how all the multifariousness and activity of its life disappeared without conclusion or fruitful spiritual residue. In the movement of its eternal seething and activity, he now saw a strange inactivity, a terrible realm of words instead of deeds. He saw how every Frenchman seemed to work only in his own red-hot head; how this reading of huge journal pages ate up the whole day and did not leave a single hour for practical life; how every Frenchman was brought up on this strange whirlwind of bookish politics that was moved by printing presses, and while still alien to the class to which he belonged, still not having learned in practice all his rights and relationships, he adhered to one party or another, ardently and passionately took all its interests to heart, stood fiercely against his opponents without yet knowing by sight either his own interests, or those of his opponents… and the Italian finally became heartily sick of the very word “politics.”

  In the movement of trade, the intellect, everywhere, in everything, he saw only a strained effort and striving for newness. One person endeavored with all his might to gain the upper hand over another, if only for one moment. The merchant used all his capital for the decoration of his store alone, in order to entice the crowd with brilliance and magnificence. Book literature resorted to illustrations and typographical luxury in order to attract people’s cooled attention. Stories and novels endeavored to seize the reader with the strangeness of unheard-of passions, the monstrosity of exceptions to human nature. Everything seemed to insolently obtrude itself and offer itself without being invited, like a lewd woman who tries to catch a man on the street; everything tried to stretch its hand higher than the others, like a surrounding crowd of annoying beggars. In scholarship itself, in its inspired lectures, the merit of which he could not help but acknowledge, he now noticed everywhere the desire to show off, to boast, to display oneself; everywhere there were brilliant episodes, but not the solemn, majestic flow of the entire whole. Everywhere there were efforts to raise up facts that had not before been noticed and to give them a huge influence, sometimes to the detriment of the harmony of the whole, in order to keep for oneself the honor of a discovery; finally, almost everywhere there was audacious self-assurance and nowhere the humble consciousness of one’s own ignorance—and he recalled a verse with which the Italian Alfieri, in a caustic spiritual mood, had reproached the French:

  Tutto fanno, nulla sanno,

  Tutto sanno, nulla fanno;

  Gira volta son Francesi,

  Più gli pesi, men ti danno.13

  He was seized by a melancholy spiritual mood. In vain did he try to distract himself, to become friends with the people he respected, but his Italian nature was incompatible with the French element.14 Friendship would start up quickly, but in a single day the Frenchman would manifest himself down to the last trait: The next day there was nothing more to learn about him, one could not dip into his soul with a question further than a certain depth, the point of a thought would pierce no further; and the Italian’s feelings were too strong to encounter a full response in the Frenchman’s light nature. And he found a kind of strange emptiness even in the hearts of those whom he could not help but respect. He saw finally that, for all its brilliant features, for all its noble impulses, its chivalrous flashes, the whole nation was something pale, incomplete, the kind of ethereal vaudeville that it had itself originated. No majestically sedate idea could take repose in it. Everywhere there were hints of an idea but no ideas themselves; everywhere there were semi-passions but no passions, everything was unfinished, tossed off, sketched with a swift hand; the whole nation was a brilliant vignette, not the painting of a great master.

  Whether it was that the spleen that had abruptly overcome him gave him the possibility of seeing everything this way, or whether it was the Italian’s inner feeling, true and fresh—one or the other, but Paris with all its brilliance and noise quickly became an oppressive wilderness for him, and he involuntarily chose its obscure, remote extremities. He went only to the Italian opera now, only there did his soul seem to take rest, and the sounds of his native language now grew before him in all their potency and plenitude. And the Italy he had forgotten began to appear to him more frequently, in the distance, in a kind of enticing light; with each day its beckoning calls became more audible, and he finally decided to write to his father to ask permission to return to Rome, saying that he saw no need to remain in Paris any longer. For two months he got no answer, nor even the usual bills of exchange that he should have long ago received. At first, he waited impatiently, knowing the capricious character of his father, but finally he was overcome by anxiety. Several times a week he visited his banker, and he always got the same answer, that there was no news from Rome. Despair was about to flare up in his soul. His means of support had long ago run out, he had long ago taken out a loan from his banker, but that money too had long ago been spent, he had long been dining, breakfasting, and living by means of haphazard debts; people were starting to look at him askance and unpleasantly—if only he had had some kind of news from any of his friends. At this moment he powerfully felt his solitude.

  In anxious expectation he wandered in this city that had wearied him to death. In the summer he found it all the more intolerable: The visiting crowds had scattered off to the mineral waters, to the hotels and roads of Europe. The phantom of emptiness could be seen in everything. The houses and streets of Paris were unbearable, its gardens languished crushingly between houses scorched by the sun. Like a dead man he would stop on a massive, heavy bridge overlooking the Seine, on its stifling embankment, trying in vain to lose himself in something, to gaze at something with absorption; a boundless anguish was devouring him, and a nameless worm was gnawing at his heart. Finally, fate had mercy on him—and one day the banker handed over a letter. It was from his uncle, who informed him that the old prince was no more, and that he could come to dispose of his inheritance, which required his personal presence, because it was in great disarray. Enclosed with the letter was a meager banknote that would hardly be enough for the journey and for paying off a quarter of his debts. The young prince did not want to delay a single moment; he managed somehow to persuade the banker to defer the debt, and he took a place in an express coach.

  It seemed as if a terrible weight fell from his soul when Paris disappeared from sight and the fresh air of the fields breathed on him. In two days he was already in Marseille, he did not want to rest for even an hour, and the same evening he transferred to a steamer. The Mediterranean Sea seemed like home to him: It washed the shores of his fatherland; he already felt fresher merely looking at its endless waves. It would be difficult to explain the feeling that enveloped him at the sight of the first Italian city—it was magnificent Genoa. Its motley campaniles, striped churches built of white and black marble, and its whole multitowered amphitheater, which suddenly surrounded him from all sides, rose before him in twofold beauty when the steamer arrived at the dock. He had never seen Genoa before. The playful motley of houses, churches, and palaces in the fine air of the sky, which gleamed with an inconceivable blueness, was unique. After descending to the shore, he suddenly found himself in those dark, marvelous, narrow streets paved with flagstones, with only a narrow little strip of blue sky overhead. He was struck by the closeness between the tall, huge houses, the absence of the clatter of carriages, the little triangular squares, and the crooked lines of the streets that passed between them like tight corridors, filled with the shops of the Genoese silversmiths and goldsmiths. The picturesque lace veils of the women, barely stirred by the warm sirocco; their firm step and ringing talk in the streets; the open doors of the churches, the smell of incense that wafted out of them—all
this breathed on him with something distant, something past. He remembered that for many years he had not been in church, which had lost its pure, lofty significance in those intellectual lands of Europe where he had been. He went in quietly and knelt in silence by the magnificent marble columns and prayed for a long time, himself not knowing for what: He prayed that Italy had accepted him, that the desire to pray had descended on him, that his soul felt festive—and this prayer was probably the best one. In short, he carried Genoa along with him as a beautiful stopover: It was there that he received Italy’s first kiss.

  With the same luminous feeling he saw Livorno, unpopulated Pisa, and Florence, which he had not known well before. The heavy faceted dome of its cathedral, the dark palaces of regal architecture, and the austere grandeur of the small city looked at him majestically. Then he hurried across the Appenines, accompanied by the same bright spiritual mood, and when, after a six-day journey, he saw in the luminous distance, against the pure sky, the marvelously rounded dome—oh! How many feelings crowded together at once in his breast!15 He did not know and could not convey them; he examined every little hill and declivity. And now, finally, here was the Ponte Molle, the city gates, and now he was embraced by that beauty among squares, the Piazza del Popolo; he saw Monte Pincio with its terraces, staircases, statues, and people strolling on the heights.16 My God! How his heart began to pound! The cab rushed along the Via del Corso, where he had once walked with the priest when he was innocent and simplehearted and knew only that the Latin language is the father of Italian. Now again all the buildings he knew by heart appeared before him: Palazzo Ruspoli with its enormous café, Piazza Colonna, Palazzo Sciarra, Palazzo Doria; finally, he turned into the lanes that are so reviled by foreigners, lanes not seething with life, where one encountered only occasionally the shop of a barber with lilies painted over the door, and the shop of a hatter, with a broad-brimmed cardinal’s hat sticking out of the door, and a nasty little shop where wicker chairs were made right there on the street.17

  Finally, the coach stopped in front of a palace in the style of Bramante.18 There was no one in the bare, untidy entrance hall. On the staircase he was met by the decrepit maestro di casa, because the doorman with his mace had as usual gone to the café, where he spent all his time. The old man ran to open the shutters and to gradually illuminate the stately halls. A sad feeling took possession of the prince—a feeling that can be understood by anyone who comes home after several years of absence, when every single thing seems even older and emptier, and when every object one knew in childhood speaks oppressively—and the more cheerful the incidents connected to it were, the more crushing the sadness they convey to the heart. He passed through a long row of halls, inspected the study and bedroom where not so long ago the old owner of the palace would fall asleep in his bed under a canopy with tassels and a coat of arms, and then would go out to his study in his dressing gown and slippers to drink a glass of donkey’s milk, for the purpose of putting on weight; the dressing room, where he would primp with the refined care of an old coquette and then set off in a carriage with his footmen for a stroll at the Villa Borghese, constantly directing his lorgnette at an Englishwoman who also came there to have a stroll. On the tables and in the drawers, one could still see the remnants of the rouge, white pigment, and all sorts of ointments that the old man used to make himself look younger. The maestro di casa declared that two weeks before his death he had formed the firm intention of getting married and had consulted on purpose with foreign doctors about how he could maintain con onore i doveri di marito; but that one day, after he had made two or three visits to some cardinals and a prior, he returned home exhausted, sat in his armchair, and died the death of a righteous man, although his death would have been even more blessed if, as the maestro di casa said, he had thought to send two minutes earlier for his father confessor, il padre Benvenuto.19 The young prince listened to all this absentmindedly, not applying his thoughts to anything.

  After resting from his journey and his strange impressions, he started dealing with his own affairs. He was struck by their terrible disorder. Everything from small to large was in a senseless, entangled state. Four endless lawsuits over crumbling palaces and lands in Ferrara and Naples, income laid waste for three years in advance, debts and beggarly scarcity amid magnificence—that is what met his eye. The old prince was an incomprehensible combination of miserliness and opulence. He kept an enormous staff of servants, who never received any wages, nothing but their liveries, and contented themselves with handouts from the foreigners who came to see the picture gallery. The prince had gamekeepers, stewards, footmen who rode out with him on the back of his carriage, footmen who never rode anywhere and would sit all day long in the neighboring café or osteria, talking all kinds of nonsense. He immediately dismissed all this riffraff, all the gamekeepers and huntsmen, and kept only the old maestro di casa; he abolished the stables almost entirely, selling the horses that were never used; he summoned lawyers and disposed of his lawsuits, or at least made it so that of the four only two remained, abandoning the others as being completely useless; he resolved to limit himself in everything and to lead his life with the strictest economy. This was not hard for him to do, because he had become accustomed early on to limiting himself. He also had no difficulty in renouncing any association with his own class—which, by the way, consisted of only two or three families that were living out their days, a society that had been brought up haphazardly on the echoes of French education, plus a rich banker who gathered a circle of foreigners around himself, plus some unapproachable cardinals, unsociable and hard-hearted people who spent their time in seclusion, playing tresette (a form of the “fools” card game) with their butler or barber.20

  In short, he utterly secluded himself, he started to study Rome, and in that respect he started to resemble a foreigner who at first is struck by its petty, lackluster exterior, by its stained, dark houses, and asks in bewilderment as he wanders from lane to lane: Where is the enormous, ancient Rome?—and then he recognizes it, when little by little out of the cramped lanes, ancient Rome begins to emerge, here in a dark archway, there in a marble cornice embedded in a wall, here in a darkened porphyry column, there in a pediment in the midst of a stinking fish market, here in an intact portico in front of a modern church; and finally in the distance, where the living city ends entirely, it rises tremendously amidst thousand-year-old ivies and aloes in the middle of the open plains in the form of the immense Colosseum, triumphal arches, the remains of the boundless palaces of the Caesars, the imperial baths, temples, and tombs, scattered about the fields; and the stranger no longer sees its present-day cramped streets and lanes, he is all enveloped by the ancient world: In his memory arise the colossal images of the Caesars; the shouts and applause of the ancient crowd strike his ear…

  But he was not like a foreigner devoted only to Livy and Tacitus, who runs past everything to get to the ancient world, wishing in a burst of noble pedantry to level the whole modern city to the ground—no, he found everything equally beautiful: the ancient world, which stirred from under a dark architrave; the powerful Middle Ages, which had left everywhere the traces of artist-giants and the magnificent largesse of the popes; and finally, stuck onto them both, the new age with its thronging new population.21 He liked the way they merged into one, he liked these signs of a populous capital city and a wilderness together: a palace, columns, grass, wild bushes climbing the walls, the palpitating market amid the dark, silent hulks shadowed from below, the lively cry of the fishmonger by the portico, and the lemonade seller with the airy little shop decorated with greenery in front of the Pantheon. He liked the very homeliness of the dark and untidy streets, he liked the absence of yellow and other light colors on the houses, he liked the idyll in the middle of the city: a herd of goats resting on the street pavement, the shouts of the urchins, and a sort of invisible presence of a luminous, solemn silence on everything, a silence that embraced you. He liked these incessant suddennesses, unexpect
ednesses, that struck you in Rome.

  Like a hunter who goes out in the morning to the chase, like an ancient knight seeking adventures, he would set off every day to seek out more and more new miracles, and he would stop involuntarily when suddenly in the middle of an insignificant lane there would rise before him a palace breathing an austere, dusky grandeur. Its heavy, indestructible walls were composed of dark travertine, its top was crowned by a magnificently set colossal cornice, the great door was faced by marble beams, and the windows looked majestic, laden with luxurious architectural ornamentation. Or how suddenly, unexpectedly, a small square would peep out along with a picturesque fountain that sprayed itself as well as its granite steps, disfigured by moss; how a dark, dirty street would unexpectedly end with the playful architectural decoration of Bernini, or an obelisk soaring upward, or a church and a monastery wall blazing with the brilliance of the sun against the dark-azure sky, with cypresses as black as coal.22 And the more deeply the streets receded, the more frequently there rose up palaces and architectural creations by Bramante, Borromini, Sangallo, della Porta, Vignola, Buonarotti—and finally he clearly understood that only here, only in Italy, could one sense the presence of architecture and its austere majesty as a form of art.23