The Nose

Ivan Yakovlevich the barber slices into his breakfast loaf and finds a nose baked inside it, and he knows at once whose it is. Across Petersburg, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov wakes to a smooth flat patch where his own nose used to sit, and by afternoon he has spotted the thing about town in a plumed hat and a gold-braided uniform, stepping down from a carriage, three ranks his senior, praying in Kazan Cathedral with an air of the greatest piety. It will not talk to him; it says they serve in different departments. What makes the story unbearable and hilarious at once is that Kovalyov never wonders how, only what people will say: his marriage prospects, his promotion, whether he can still be seen on Nevsky Prospekt. Gogol tells all of it in the flat, faintly bored voice of a man reporting a mild civic irregularity, and offers no explanation at the end, because a city where a man is his uniform has already explained itself.