A Petersburg barber finds a nose in his morning bread; the nose's owner, a minor official, encounters it walking around in a uniform of higher rank. Gogol's 1836 story defies interpretation: it is not allegory, not satire exactly, not realism, not surrealism before surrealism existed. The nose goes to church, gets caught, refuses to reattach, then reappears on the official's face without explanation. The story simply happens, absurd and inexplicable, and everything that followed in Russian literature had to reckon with its existence.