The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol

  Akaky Akakievich looked at all this as at something new. It had been several years since he had gone out onto the street in the evening. He stopped in front of an illuminated store window to look curiously at a picture that depicted a beautiful woman who had taken off her shoe, thus baring her entire, rather nice-looking foot; and behind her back, a man with whiskers and a beautiful imperial beard under his lip was sticking his head out of the door of another room. Akaky Akakievich shook his head and grinned and then went on his way. Why he grinned—whether it was because he had encountered a thing that he was quite unfamiliar with but for which, nevertheless, everyone retains a certain instinct, or whether he thought like many other civil servants, the following: “Well, I never, those Frenchmen! It can’t be denied, if they want something like, well indeed it’s just like…” But perhaps he didn’t even think that—after all, you can’t crawl into a person’s soul and find out everything he’s thinking.

  Finally, he reached the building in which the assistant desk head had his apartment. The assistant desk head lived in the grand manner: A lamp was shining on the stairway, and the apartment was on the second floor. As he came into the anteroom, Akaky Akakievich saw whole rows of overshoes on the floor. Among them, in the middle of the room, stood a samovar, making noise and emitting puffs of steam. On the walls hung all sorts of overcoats and cloaks, some of which even had beaver collars or velvet lapels. On the other side of the wall one could hear noise and talk, which suddenly became clear and ringing when the door opened, and a footman came out carrying a tray covered with emptied glasses, a creamer, and a basket of biscuits. It was obvious that the civil servants had assembled a long time ago and had already drunk their first glass of tea.

  Akaky Akakievich hung up his overcoat himself, went into the room, and all at once there flashed in his eyes candles, civil servants, pipes, and card tables, and his ear was struck by the indistinct sound of fluent conversation rising from all directions and the noise of chairs being moved. He stopped very awkwardly in the middle of the room, looking around and trying to figure out what he should do. But they had already noticed him and received him with a shout, and they all went to the anteroom right away to look at his overcoat again. Although he was partly embarrassed, Akaky Akakievich, being an open-hearted man, could not help but be glad when he saw how everyone praised his overcoat. Then, of course, they all abandoned both him and the overcoat and addressed themselves to the tables prepared for whist, as is usual. All of this—the noise, the talk, and the crowd of people—all this was somehow wondrous strange for Akaky Akakievich. He simply did not know what he should do, where to put his hands, feet, and his whole figure. Finally, he took a seat near the card players, looked at the cards, peeped into this one’s and that one’s faces, and after a while began to yawn, feeling bored, all the more since it had long since been the customary time for him to go to bed. He wanted to say goodbye to the host, but they didn’t let him go, saying that they absolutely had to each drink a glass of champagne in honor of the new garment. An hour later they served supper, consisting of vinaigrette salad, cold veal, pâté, pastries, and champagne. Akaky Akakievich was forced to drink two glasses, after which he felt that the room had become more cheerful, although he could not forget that it was already twelve o’clock and long past time for him to go home. To avoid letting the host think up some way of keeping him there, he quietly left the room and found his overcoat in the anteroom. Not without regret did he see it lying on the floor. He shook it out, removed every bit of fluff from it, put it on his shoulders, and went down the stairs to the street.

  On the street it was still light. A few grocery stores, those permanent clubs for house servants and all other kinds of servants, were open, while others that were closed nevertheless emitted a long stream of light all along the crack of the door, signifying that they were not yet devoid of society, and that probably the servant women or men were still finishing up their discussions and conversations, plunging their masters into complete bewilderment about where they might be located. Akaky Akakievich walked along in cheerful spirits; he even started suddenly to run, for some unknown reason, after a lady who had passed by at the speed of lightning, every part of her body suffused with extraordinary motion. He immediately stopped, however, and started walking the way he had before, very quietly, himself amazed at his trotting gait that had come from no one knows where.

  Soon there stretched before him those deserted streets that are not too cheerful even in daytime, not to mention in the evening. Now they became even more remote and secluded. The streetlamps appeared less often—apparently, less lamp oil was being allocated; wooden houses and fences appeared; there was not a soul anywhere; the only thing that sparkled was the snow on the streets, and the low, sleeping little hovels with closed shutters appeared dismally black. He approached the place where the street was intersected by an endless square with buildings barely visible on its other side, which looked like a terrifying desert.

  In the distance, God knows where, a little light flickered in a policeman’s booth that seemed to be standing on the edge of the world. Here Akaky Akakievich’s cheerfulness decreased significantly. He entered the square not without an involuntary apprehension, exactly as if his heart had a premonition of something evil. He looked back and to either side: It was as if a sea surrounded him. “No, it’s better not to look,” he thought, and walked along with his eyes closed, and when he opened them to see whether the end of the square was near, he suddenly saw that some people with mustaches were standing almost right in front of his nose, but what kind of people they were, he could not even make out. A fog came over his eyes and a beating started in his chest. “Hey, that overcoat is mine!” one of them said in a voice of thunder, grabbing him by the collar. Akaky Akakievich was about to try to shout “Help!” when the other one stuck a fist the size of a civil servant’s head up to his very mouth and said: “Now just try and shout!” Akaky Akakievich felt only that they took the overcoat off of him and gave him a kick with their knee, and he fell onto his back in the snow, and he didn’t feel anything more.

  A few minutes later he came to himself and got up onto his feet, but no one was there. He felt that it was cold out in the field and he had no overcoat. He started to shout, but his voice, it seemed, had no intention of making it all the way to the far ends of the square. In desperation, shouting constantly, he started running across the square right to the booth, next to which stood the policeman on duty, leaning on his halberd and watching, seemingly curious to know why the hell someone was running toward him from a distance and shouting. Akaky Akakievich ran up to him and began to shout in a panting voice that he was asleep and not looking at anything and didn’t see them robbing a person. The policeman answered that he hadn’t seen anything; he did see two people stop him in the middle of the square, but he thought they were his friends; and he said that instead of indulging in vain abuse, he should go tomorrow to see the district police inspector, and the district police inspector would find out who had taken the overcoat.

  Akaky Akakievich came running home in utter disorder. His hair, of which he still had a small quantity on his temples and the back of his head, was completely messed up. His side and chest and trousers were all covered with snow. The old woman, the landlady of his apartment, hearing a terrible knocking at the door, hurriedly jumped out of bed and with only one shoe on went running to open the door, holding her nightgown closed over her breast, out of modesty; but when she opened it, she stepped back, seeing Akaky Akakievich in such a state. When he told her what had happened, she threw up her hands and said that he needed to go right to the sector inspector, that the district inspector would put one over on him, he would make promises and then would drag it out; but best of all would be to go right to the sector inspector, that she was even acquainted with him, because Anna, the Finnish woman who used to work for her as a cook, had now gotten a job as a nanny for the sector inspector, that she often saw him himself as he was riding by their building, and
that he also came to church every Sunday, he’d pray and at the same time look at everyone cheerfully, and that it follows that he obviously must be a kind person.

  After hearing this solution, Akaky Akakievich sadly plodded off to his room, and how he spent the night there I will leave to the judgment of anyone who can in the least bit imagine the situation of another person. Early in the morning, he set off to see the sector inspector, but they said he was sleeping; he came at ten o’clock—they said again, he’s sleeping; he came at eleven o’clock—they said, the sector inspector is not home; he came at dinnertime—but the clerks in the vestibule did not want to let him through and demanded to know what his business was and what had necessitated his visit and what had happened. So finally, for once in his life, Akaky Akakievich felt like showing some character, and he said point-blank that he needed to see the sector inspector himself personally, that they wouldn’t dare not to let him in, that he had come from the Department on official business, and that he would make such a complaint about them that then they would see. The clerks did not dare to say anything against this, and one of them went to summon the sector inspector. The sector inspector received the story of the theft of the overcoat in an extremely strange manner. Instead of paying attention to the main point of the matter, he started interrogating Akaky Akakievich: Why was he returning home so late, had he perhaps dropped into and spent time in some disorderly house; so that Akaky Akakievich got completely embarrassed and left without knowing whether the proper process for the case of the overcoat would be put in motion or not.

  That whole day he was absent from the office (the only time in his life this had happened). The next day he presented himself, all pale and wearing his old housecoat, which had become even more deplorable. His narrative about the theft of the overcoat, despite the fact that there were some civil servants who didn’t miss even this opportunity to make fun of Akaky Akakievich, nevertheless moved the hearts of many of them. They immediately decided to take up a collection for him, but they collected only the most trivial sum, because the civil servants had already spent a lot subscribing to buy a portrait of the director and some book suggested by the section head, the author of which was a friend of his—and so it turned out to be a trivial sum. One of them, moved by compassion, decided to help Akaky Akakievich at least with good advice, and said that he should go not to the district police inspector, because although it might happen that the district police inspector, wishing to earn the approval of his supervisors, would find the overcoat by some means, nevertheless the overcoat would remain with the police, if he could not present legitimate proof that it belonged to him; so it would be best of all if he would apply to a certain significant personage, that the significant personage, after exchanging letters and communicating with the appropriate people, could make the case go more successfully. There was no escaping it; Akaky Akakievich decided to go to see the significant personage.12

  What exactly the post of the significant personage was and in what it consisted is still unknown to this day. The reader must know that a certain significant personage had only recently been made a significant personage, and before that he had been an insignificant personage. By the way, even now his position is not considered significant in comparison to other, even more significant positions. But there will always be a circle of people for whom something that other people consider insignificant is significant. Nevertheless, he tried to enhance its significance by many other means, namely: He made a rule that the lower-ranking civil servants had to meet him on the stairway when he came to the office; that no one could dare to present themselves to him directly, but that everything had to go in the strictest order: a collegiate registrar would report to a provincial secretary, the provincial secretary would report to a titular councillor or whoever else, and in this way the business would finally reach him. That’s how it is in holy Russia, everything is infected by imitation, everyone imitates and poses as his supervisor. They even say that a certain titular councillor, when they made him the administrator of some separate little chancellery, immediately partitioned off a special room for himself, calling it the “official room,” and stationed some footmen with red collars and gold braid at the door, who would take hold of the doorknobs and open them to all visitors, although there was hardly enough space in the “official room” to place an ordinary writing desk.

  The manners and habits of the significant personage were sedate and majestic but not complicated. The main basis of his system was strictness. “Strictness, strictness, and—strictness,” he would usually say, and at the final word he would usually look very significantly into the face of the person he was talking to. Although there was really no reason for this, because the dozen civil servants who made up the entire governing mechanism of the chancellery were already as terrified as was appropriate. When they saw him coming from a distance, they would stop their work and wait, standing at attention, until the supervisor had passed through the room. His usual conversation with his inferiors had a flavor of strictness and consisted almost entirely of three phrases: “How dare you? Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you understand who is standing in front of you?” In his soul, however, he was a kind man, good and obliging with his colleagues, but the rank of general had completely thrown him off course. After he obtained the rank of general, he seemed to get confused, to lose his way, and he didn’t know at all what he should do. If he happened to be with his equals, he was a proper person, a very decent person, in many respects even an intelligent person; but as soon as he happened to be in company where there were people even one rank lower than him, he was simply wretched. He would be silent, and his situation would arouse pity, all the more since he himself felt that he could be spending his time in an incomparably better way. One could sometimes see in his eyes a powerful desire to join in some interesting conversation and circle, but he would be stopped by the thought: Would that not be too much on his part, would that not be too familiar, and would he not thereby lower his significance? And as a result of such meditations he would remain eternally in the very same silent state, only uttering a few monosyllabic sounds from time to time, and in this way he acquired the title of the most boring person.

  This is the significant personage to whom our Akaky Akakievich presented himself, and he presented himself at the most inauspicious time, extremely inopportunely for himself, although most opportunely for the significant personage. The significant personage was in his private office and had gotten into a very, very cheerful conversation with a certain old acquaintance and childhood friend who had arrived recently, whom he hadn’t seen for several years. At that moment they announced to him that someone named Bashmachkin had come to see him. He asked brusquely: “Who is that?” They answered: “Some civil servant.”—“Ah! He can wait, I don’t have time now,” the significant person said. Here we must say that the significant person had told a blatant lie. He had time; he and the acquaintance had already long managed to talk about everything and had long been interspersing their conversation with prolonged silences, patting each other lightly on the thigh and saying: “So, Ivan Abramovich!”—“That’s how it is, Stepan Varlamovich!” But for all that, nevertheless, he ordered the civil servant to wait, in order to show his acquaintance, a person who had left the service long ago and had been buried at home in the country, how long civil servants had to sit waiting in his anteroom.

  Finally, having talked their fill and having been silent even more than their fill, and having smoked a cigarillo in extremely comfortable armchairs with reclining backs, he finally seemed to suddenly remember and said to the secretary who had stopped by the door with some documents to be submitted: “Yes, it seems there’s some civil servant standing out there; tell him that he can come in.” Seeing Akaky Akakievich’s humble appearance and his old uniform, he turned to him suddenly and said: “What can I do for you?”—in a brusque and firm voice, which he had practiced on purpose in advance in his room, all alone in front of the mirror, a week before h
e obtained his present position and the rank of general. Akaky Akakievich, who had started feeling the proper timidity well in advance, was somewhat embarrassed and, as much as the freedom of his tongue would allow him, explained as best he could, adding the particle “like” even more frequently than usual, that it was a quite new overcoat, and now it had been stolen in the most inhumane fashion, and that he was applying to him so that by means of some kind of petition somehow like, he would exchange letters with Mr. Chief of Police or somebody like that and find his overcoat. For some unknown reason, this behavior seemed to the general to be too familiar.

  “What’s wrong with you, my dear sir,” he continued brusquely, “don’t you know the correct procedure? Where do you think you’ve come? Don’t you know how things are done? You should have first submitted an appeal about this to the Chancellery; it would have gone to the desk head, to the section head, and then it would have been transmitted to the secretary, and the secretary would have delivered it to me….”

  “But, Your Excellency,” Akaky Akakievich said, trying to gather the entire little fistful of nerve that was in him, and feeling at the same time that he was sweating horribly, “I ventured to trouble Your Excellency because secretaries are like… an unreliable folk…”

  “What, what, what?” the significant personage said. “Where did you get the nerve? Where did you get ideas like this? What sort of riotous conduct has spread among young people against their supervisors and superiors!”

  It seems that the significant personage had not noticed that Akaky Akakievich was already past the age of fifty. It follows that if he could be called a young person, it was only in a relative sense, in other words, in relation to someone who was past seventy.