The Nose and Other Stories

2. See the interpretation by Roman Koropeckyj and Robert Romanchuk, “Ukraine in Blackface: Performance and Representation in Gogol’s Dikan’ka Tales, Book 1,” Slavic Review 62, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 525–47. See also Yuliya Ilchuk, “Performing Hybrid Identity: The Editing History of Gogol’s Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki (1831–1832),” Studies in Slavic Culture, vol. 7, ed. Alyssa DeBlasio and Julie Draskoczy (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2008), 28–49.

5. This transition has been traced in detail by the greatest scholar of Gogol, Iurii V. Mann. See, for example, “Èvoliutsiia gogolevskoi fantastiki,” in K istorii russkogo romantizma, ed. Iu. V. Mann, I. G. Neupokoeva, and U. R. Fokht (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), 219–58; and Mann, Poetika Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978). See also Priscilla Meyer, “False Pretenders and the Spiritual City: ‘A May Night’ and ‘The Overcoat,’ ” in Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, ed. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 63–74.

7. Rita Giuliani [Rita Dzhuliani], Rim v zhizni i tvorchestve Gogolia, ili poteriannyi rai: Materialy i issledovaniia, trans. A. Iampol’skaia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009); and Michael R. Kelly, “Gogol’s ‘Rome’: On the Threshold of Two Worlds,” Slavic and East European Journal 47, no. 1 (2003): 24–44. Kelly writes, “For English-speaking readers of Gogol’s works, the time has come for ‘Rome’ to be translated and included in collections of his tales” (39). On the form of the story in relation to Gogol’s other works and on the nature of the city itself as a fragment, see Fusso, Designing Dead Souls, 110–14.

1. The narrator, Foma Grigorievich, is a lector, belonging to a minor order of clergy charged with reading scripture in church services. The akathist is a song of praise to a saint, to Christ, or to the Mother of God. The akathist to Saint Barbara, a fourth-century martyr, was composed by the Kyiv Metropolitan Ioasaf Krokovskyi in the early eighteenth century. Prayers were made to Saint Barbara for salvation from sudden death, which makes Foma Grigorievich’s vow particularly humorous.

3. “Fools” is a popular card game (similar to the Russian game durak) based on getting rid of all the cards in one’s hand; the player left with cards is the “fool.” In a letter to his mother of May 22, 1829 (OS), Gogol asked her to send him descriptions of various Ukrainian card games, as well as stories told by the peasants about adventures in which “spirits and demons [nechistye, lit. the unclean ones]” take part (Academy PSS 10: 144).

4. This story is based on a pun: The word for “letter” in the title, gramota, also means “literacy.” Thus, the discussion of how many literate people could be found in Baturyn is directly related to the “letter” that drives the plot. Baturyn was in the province of Little Russia, on the Seym River (present-day northern Ukraine). Orthodox clergy could marry and have children.

5. There is no simple definition for the term “Cossack.” It encompasses groups of people that differ based on geography and history. Although Cossacks began mainly as serfs who ran away and sought their freedom in the steppes, the Cossacks of eighteenth-century Ukraine were a fairly well defined and hierarchical social group, organized as a Hetman state that existed from 1648 to 1782 and combined elements of republicanism and monarchism. The empress is probably Catherine II (ruled 1762–1796).

8. The Zaporozhian Sich was a semiautonomous group of Cossacks living beyond the rapids of the Dnieper River. Fears of their growing independence led Catherine II to disband the Zaporozhian Sich by a decree of 1775. The appearance and clothing of the Zaporozhian conform to the costume of this character in the Ukrainian itinerant puppet theater or “nativity play,” which combined religious and secular motifs. Gogol’s indebtedness to the Ukrainian puppet theater is elucidated by V. V. Gippius, Gogol, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989). The bandura is a string instrument closely associated with Ukrainian folk music. At this period it was similar to the lute.

10. The traditional Ukrainian Cossack hairstyle was a long lock of hair growing out of an otherwise closely shaved head.

11. The “dove dance” and gopak are Ukrainian folk dances.

12. According to superstition, if you sneeze repeatedly, it means that someone is speaking disparagingly about you.

13. The trepak (or tropak) is a Ukrainian and Russian folk dance.

14. The Orthodox calendar includes many fasts, during which foods such as meat, fish, eggs, and dairy (in various combinations) have to be avoided.

15. Granddad’s hostility to Catholicism is conditioned not only by his Orthodox faith but also by the Cossack’s attitude to his former Roman Catholic Polish-Lithuanian overlords.

1. Gogol’s footnote to the title: “Viy is the colossal creation of the common folk’s imagination. The Little Russians use this name for the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids on his eyes reach all the way to the ground. This whole story is a folk legend. I did not want to change anything about it, so I am narrating it in almost the same simple form in which I heard it.” Most scholars believe that there is no Slavic folklore source for the monster Viy, although the editors of PSS 2009 consider this an open question.

2. The Brotherhood Monastery in Kyiv was founded in 1588; the attached school was founded in 1615. The names of the class years are based on the main disciplines studied in those years (first year, Greek and Latin grammar; second year, rhetoric; third year, philosophy; and fourth year, theology). Gogol makes a distinction between the bursaks, the charity-supported students of the bursa, who live in the dormitory, and the seminarists, who rent private apartments.

3. Gogol’s early work is deeply indebted to the Ukrainian itinerant puppet theater or “nativity play,” a folk tradition that combined religious and secular motifs. The influence on Gogol of the Ukrainian puppet theater is elucidated by V. V. Gippius, Gogol, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989). The Kyiv bell tower is that of the Kyivo-Pechers’ka Lavra or the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves, erected 1731–1745 (96.5 meters in height).

9. There is no simple definition for the term “Cossack.” It encompasses groups of people that differ based on geography and history. Although Cossacks began mainly as serfs who ran away and sought their freedom in the steppes, the Cossacks of eighteenth-century Ukraine were a fairly well-defined and hierarchical social group, organized as a Hetman state that existed from 1648 to 1782 and combined elements of republicanism and monarchism.

10. The Slavic bathhouse ritual involves whipping with young birch branches to stimulate the circulation.

11. I have chosen to keep the term pannochka, because it has a kind of incantatory power in the story. As a Polish-Ukrainian term for the unmarried daughter of a lord, it would have an exotic sound for a Russian reader.

12. The bare hill evokes both Golgotha/Calvary, translated in the Gospels as “the place of the skull,” where according to legend Jesus was crucified, and the “bald hill” that is the location of witches’ sabbaths in East Slavic folklore.

13. Again, sex would be forbidden during Holy Week, the greatest fast of the Christian year.

14. In the story as published in Gogol’s lifetime in Mirgorod and his 1842 Collected Works, this phrase reads, “a funeral song,” not “a song about an oppressed people.” This change to the manuscript version of the story was apparently dictated by the censor. Although the phrase might refer to the Ukrainian people, it might also refer to the November Uprising of 1830–1831 in Poland. (Taras Koznarsky, personal communication reported in Robert Romanchuk, “Mother Tongue: Gogol’ ’s Pannochka, Pogorel’skii’s Monastyrka, and the Economy of Russian in the Little Russian Gothic,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 62, no. 2 [2018]: 272–92, 276n10.)

15. The nickname kovtun (hair-mat) refers to “Polish plait,” which is either a disorder of the hair leading to matting or a hairstyle in which the mats are intentionally created by liquid or wax, a practice thought to alleviate illness.

16. The term translated here as “best friend” is kum, which strictly refers to the godfather of one’s child, or the father of one’s godchild, but can also be used more loosely to mean a close friend.

17. Sheptun was a term for a folk healer, derived from the word for “to whisper.”

18. In this paragraph, Gogol switches from using the masculine pronoun, as is appropriate for the word trup (corpse), and the feminine pronoun, even though the noun pannochka does not appear. I have tried to preserve the strangeness of this shift. (In 1842, when preparing to publish a four-volume collection of his works, Gogol reworked the original 1835 version of this story. The 1835 version of this passage includes the word mertvaia [dead woman], which has been omitted in the 1842 version, thus apparently leading to the discrepancy in pronouns.)

19. In the 1835 version of the story, a multitude of gnomes breaks into the church on the second night, including “a strange creature in the form of a regular pyramid covered with slime,” topped by a “long tongue that kept sticking out ceaselessly and bending in all directions,” a cockroach the size of an elephant, and other delicious horrors (Academy PSS 2: 574–76).

20. Khoma uses a verb that refers to bringing animals together for copulation.

21. The 1835 version of the story includes some more colorful monsters, including a yellow body with a black skeleton on the outside and “something as long and thin as a stick, consisting entirely of eyes and eyelashes” (Academy PSS 2: 583).

22. The 1835 version of the story ends here.

2. Khosrow Mirza (1813–1875) was a Persian prince, the grandson of the shah, who was sent as the head of a diplomatic mission to the court of Nicholas I to apologize for the murder of Russia’s ambassador to Persia, the poet Alexander Griboedov, in January 1829. Khosrow Mirza made a grand entrance to St. Petersburg in August 1829 and stayed for more than two months, becoming a media sensation. His portrait was widely circulated. The “pictures that attest to the native talent of the Russian” are lubki, cheap woodcuts and engravings, often brightly colored and combining images with texts, depicting fairy tales, biblical stories, and popular tales. Miliktrisa Kirbitievna is a character in the fairy tale Bova Korolevich, which dates to the sixteenth century and was widely illustrated in lubki.

3. Yeruslan Lazarevich is the hero of a fairytale that was immensely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and served as a source for Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820). The Glutton-Drunkard was another popular woodcut, which depicted a gigantic glutton being served by tiny attendants, and was probably based on French depictions of Louis XVI as Rabelais’s Gargantua. Foma and Yeryoma were the comic heroes of tales about two brothers distinguished by their foolishness and absurdity.

10. It is fairly clear from the original text that “yet another place” is a brothel.

11. Psyche, whose name means “soul” in Greek, is the heroine of the tale of Cupid and Psyche told in The Golden Ass by Apuleius.

12. The basilisk is a legendary serpent with a lethal gaze, most famously described in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.

13. Titular councillor is rank 9 in the Table of Ranks (see frontmatter). Because promotion to rank 8 conferred hereditary nobility, many civil servants remained “stuck” at rank 9.

14. Russia was at war with Turkey in 1787–1791, 1806–1812, and 1828–1829. The dating of the action of the story is not clear.

15. The name Grigory comes from the Greek meaning “watchful, alert.”

1. The frock coat came into fashion in Russia in the early nineteenth century and was originally an outer garment. It differed from the tailcoat in having a skirt all around the base and a higher closure. Over time it became shorter and developed into the modern suit jacket. The editors of PSS Mann note that Gogol himself was twenty-five years old at the time he wrote “Nevsky Avenue.” Gogol had a personal interest in stylish clothing. While still in school in Nizhyn, he wrote to his friend G. I. Vysotsky in St. Petersburg, asking him to have a tailcoat made for him by the best tailor: “Please write me what kind of fashionable fabrics you have for waistcoats, for trousers…. I would really like to have a dark-blue one with metallic buttons made for myself” (letter of June 26, 1827, OS, Academy PSS 10: 102).

10. The “prints that don’t dare to show themselves in broad daylight” also make an appearance in “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.”

11. Perugino is Pietro Vannucci (ca. 1446 to 1452–1523), Italian Renaissance painter and teacher of Raphael. There are various hypotheses as to the specific painting referred to here, as there is no painting by Perugino called “Bianca.”

12. The word translated here as “setting,” oklad, refers to the metal frame of an icon. This harmonizes with Piskaryov’s vision of the woman as a divinity “who seemed to have flown down from heaven right onto Nevsky Avenue.” Gogol wrote in similar terms to his mother about a (perhaps fictional) woman he had met in St. Petersburg (July 24, 1829, OS, Academy PSS 10: 147–48).

13. In a letter to his mother from St. Petersburg, Gogol described the building he was living in: “The building in which I abide contains two tailors, one marchande de modes, a shoemaker, a stocking manufacturer, someone who glues broken crockery back together, a decatizer and dyer, a pastry shop, a hardware store, a warehouse for storing winter clothes, a tobacco shop, and finally a licensed midwife. Naturally, this building is entirely plastered with golden signboards” (letter of April 30, 1829, OS, Academy PSS 10: 139–40). A “decatizer” treats outerwear to make it water-resistant.

15. The Persian refers to himself with feminine grammatical forms. This is a common mistake made by nonnative speakers of Russian and other Slavic languages, but it may also be an echo of the androgynous nature of the brothel as the narrator describes it earlier in the story, “where woman, that beauty of the world, the crown of creation, has been turned into a strange, ambiguous being, where together with the purity of her soul she has been deprived of everything feminine, has revoltingly adopted the manners and insolence of a man, and has ceased to be that weak, splendid being who is so different from us.”

16. In the nineteenth century there was a fashion for jewelry made from human hair, often combined with precious metals and stones.

17. The Orthodox Church forbade all funeral rites to people who had committed suicide. Okhta was on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.

18. Hired mourners were often disabled veterans.

19. The imperfect taste of the officer class is demonstrated by their lumping Alexander Pushkin, probably Russia’s greatest writer, together with the mediocre journalists Faddei Bulgarin (1789–1859) and N. I. Grech (1787–1867) and the writer of potboilers A. A. Orlov (1791–1840).

20. The popular farces on themes from peasant life, Filatka and the Children by P. I. Grigoriev Sr., and Filatka and Miroshka the Rivals; or, Four Suitors for One Girl by P. G. Grigoriev Jr., were staged in the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1831.

21. Members of the merchant class often wore beards, which were forbidden for men in the civil service. In his play Marriage (written 1833–1835, published 1842), Gogol describes the efforts of a merchant’s daughter to marry outside her class.

22. Dmitry Donskoy (1807) was a tragedy in verse by V. A. Ozerov (1769–1816). Alexander Griboedov’s verse comedy Woe from Wit is one of the greatest masterpieces of the Russian stage. It was written in 1824 but first staged in 1831.

23. A unicorn gun was an artillery piece with a conical breech, with a unicorn depicted on it. The joke involves a general explaining the difference between a cannon and a unicorn gun to Catherine II. The joke ends with the anticlimactic punch line: “A cannon is one thing, and a unicorn gun is quite another.”

24. The gates of the Kazan Cathedral opened onto Great Meshchanskaya Street (now Kazanskaya Street), named for the social class of meshchanstvo, made up of small householders, city dwellers, and craftsmen. Many craftspeople were of non-Russian, especially German, origin.

25. William Tell (1804) was the last drama written by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), one of the two giants of German classical literature along with Goethe; his History of the Thirty Years’ War was published in 1791–1793. E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a writer of fantastic tales that were hugely popular in Russia. His influence can be seen in Gogol’s stories, including the story of Piskaryov in “Nevsky Avenue” itself. The editors of PSS Mann have found several craftsmen named Schiller and Hoffmann listed in the address books of the time. Gogol lived on Ofitserskaya Street (now Decembrists’ Street) in 1831–1832.

26. Rappee (râpé) was a high-quality French snuff. Schiller’s arithmetic is a little off (two pounds of rappee at two rubles a pound is four rubles, not six), perhaps because of his intoxication.

27. Caraway-seed vodka is probably the liqueur known as kümmel.

28. The expression “horns” refers to becoming a cuckold, a man whose wife is unfaithful.

29. The General Staff was one of the highest organs of military administration, and the State Council was the supreme advisory legislative body, created by Tsar Alexander I in 1810. It was chaired by the tsar and had its meetings in the Winter Palace. The mention of Pirogov taking his complaint to the sovereign himself was censored from the original publications of the story.

30. The Northern Bee was the first major private newspaper in Russia, published by F. V. Bulgarin and N. I. Grech (see note 20 and the notes to “Diary of a Madman”).

31. The triumphal arch of the General Staff Building, designed by Carlo (Karl Ivanovich) Rossi (1775–1849) and built in 1819–1829, is one of the most striking features of the architecture of Palace Square.

32. The Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) was a major military and political figure who played a role in the American Revolution as well as the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830. His funeral in Paris was a notable event in spring 1834, as Gogol was writing “Nevsky Avenue.”

1. The original title of this story translates literally as “Notes of a Madman,” but I have retained the traditional English title. Before the invention of steel pens, writing was done with feathers (typically from geese), which had to be periodically sharpened. According to the editors of PSS 2009, the low-level clerks who performed this task sometimes made a specialty of sharpening quills to the particular taste of their supervisors.

4. Later in the story, the madman reads the Northern Bee, a semi-official newspaper aimed at the middle classes. I. P. Zolotussky has discussed the fact that this newspaper would publish, next to news of foreign affairs (coups, revolutions), sensational stories of strange phenomena such as a boy born with three heads, a Dutch maiden who hadn’t eaten since 1818, a black rabbit with feathers instead of fur, a girl with two noses, and a half-woman, half-fish. Igor’ Petrovich Zolotusskii, “ ‘Zapiski sumasshedshego’ i ‘Severnaia pchela,’ ” in his Poeziia prozy: Stat’i o Gogole (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), accessed June 14, 2019, http://ogrik2.ru/b/igor-petrovich-zolotusskij/poeziya-prozy/4071/zapiski-sumasshedshego-i-severnaya-pchela/7.

6. Zverkov’s House was the first five-story building in St. Petersburg. Gogol lived there from October 1829 to the summer of 1831. In a letter of September 1829, he had to reassure his mother that living on the fifth floor did not fatigue him at all: “The sovereign himself occupies rooms that are no lower than mine; on the contrary, up high the air is much cleaner and healthier” (Academy PSS 10: 184). Later in the story (entry for November 12), the madman goes to the “sixth floor” to get the dogs’ letters, but Zverkov’s House had no sixth floor. Whether this is a simple oversight on Gogol’s part or an indication of the increasing unreality of the madman’s world is unclear. The friend “who plays the trumpet very well” is probably a remnant of the original conception of the story as the “diary of a mad musician.”

10. Johann Conrad Rutsch was a fashionable St. Petersburg tailor who provided clothing for Tsar Nicholas I.

11. The popular farces on themes from peasant life, Filatka and the Children by P. I. Grigoriev Sr., and Filatka and Miroshka the Rivals; or, Four Suitors for One Girl by P. G. Grigoriev Jr., were staged in the Aleksandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1831. Vaudeville was a genre of comic theater borrowed from France, which incorporated satirical songs and dances.

12. The French word équivoque means “ambiguity,” but the madman seems to be using it to mean “deceit” or “ruse.”

13. In Gogol’s time, the letter yat was identical in pronunciation to the letter ye, so only educated writers would know the correct placement of the two letters. The yat was removed from the Russian alphabet, along with several other letters, in the 1918 post-Revolutionary reform of orthography.

14. In the court Table of Ranks, gentleman of the bedchamber was rank 5, a step below chamberlain (rank 4). This position was usually held by young aristocrats in the civil service. The madman is a titular councillor, rank 9 in the civil service Table of Ranks (see frontmatter). Since promotion to rank 8 conferred hereditary nobility, many civil servants remained “stuck” at rank 9. The madman claims, however, to be of “noble descent” (entry for October 4). Irina Reyfman has written cogently about the ambiguity of the madman’s position: “On the one hand, he is portrayed as a lowly feeble-minded clerk whose service obligations seem to consist exclusively of sharpening quills for the head of his department; apparently, he is incapable of doing anything more complicated. On the other hand, not only does he have a relatively high rank but his position in the department is quite considerable; he is a desk chief, which means that several clerks are working under him. Desk chiefs were normally supposed to have the rank of court councilor [Rank 7], not titular councilor” (How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016], 110–11).

15. The mention of the sovereign was censored in the original publications of “Diary” (replaced with “baron”). The word “sovereign” was also censored from the entries for December 8 and “No date of any sort.” The pale-blue ribbon is the symbol of the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called, the highest order in the Russian Empire.

16. Freemasonry is a fraternal society that apparently arose in the Middle Ages out of artisans’ guilds. It often comes into conflict with organized religion, and in 1822 Tsar Alexander I banned Masonic lodges in Russia. When beginning a civil service post, Gogol himself had to take an oath that he did not belong to a Masonic lodge (PSS Mann). Masonic organizations maintain an air of secrecy, bolstered by symbolism known only to members, such as special hand signals and handshakes.

17. Zolotussky notes that in 1833 the Northern Bee included a special rubric called “Spanish Affairs,” devoted to controversies over the succession to the Spanish throne. King Ferdinand VII of Spain (1784–1833) rescinded the Salic Law that prevented women from succeeding to the throne, so that his three-year-old daughter Isabella could inherit the throne rather than his brother Don Carlos. This led to a series of civil wars.

18. Ice hills were set up for sledding on Winter Palace Square and Elagin Island, surrounded by other popular entertainments like fair booths and performances.

19. Philip II (1527–1598) was the builder of the Spanish Empire. The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin is an offshoot of the Franciscans. It is not clear what specific historical event, if any, the madman is referring to here.

20. “Cast-iron roads” refers to the railroad, which did not yet exist in Russia. The first railroad line, between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo, was opened in 1837. The word translated here as “steamship” could in this period also apply to any vehicle powered by steam, including a locomotive.

21. The madman seems to be thinking not of a chemist but of Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

22. Hydrotherapy was commonly used to treat mental illness in the nineteenth century. Some patients died as a result of the more extreme treatments.

23. Given his Spanish orientation, the madman is probably referring to the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (the Spanish Inquisition), established in 1478 in Spain for the purpose of combating heresy, using the methods of torture and execution.

24. Jules de Polignac, Count of Polignac (1780–1847), was prime minister of France under Charles X. His policies helped lead to the July Revolution of 1830.

25. The last Ottoman ruler of Algeria, Hussein Dey, was deposed by the French in 1830.

1. The word in the title of the story, koliaska, is a general term for carriage, usually a two-horse, four-wheeled carriage on springs with a convertible top. Other types of carriage mentioned in the story are: brichka (usually transliterated as britzka in English), a light cart, usually not on springs, sometimes open; droshky, a light, open, four-wheeled cart; cabriolet, a light, two-wheeled, one-horse cart with one seat; and tarantass, a four-wheeled, covered, horse-drawn cart on long shafts to reduce jolting on long trips. The bon voyage is glossed in Russian sources as a four-seat carriage, although I have an unprovable suspicion that Gogol made it up.

3. In Gogol’s text, the phrase translated here as “main square” is lobnoe mesto, literally “the place of the forehead.” Although the etymology is disputed, it is possibly related to Calvary or Golgotha, the “place of the skull” on which the crucifixion of Jesus Christ took place. The most famous lobnoe mesto is in Moscow, on Red Square in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral, but the phrase refers generally to a raised platform on a central square from which decrees could be read to the public and on which executions could be performed. Although executions were not performed on the lobnoe mesto in Moscow, the general sense of the phrase in the Russian cultural imagination is “place of execution,” so Gogol’s use of the phrase here for the place on which the country clodhopper is being “executed” by the soldiers is humorously bathetic. This passage was censored from the original publication of the story.

10. The apron was “a piece of leather… attached to the dash or front of a carriage, used as a lap cover to protect the occupants from rain or snow” (Don H. Berkebile, Carriage Terminology: An Historical Dictionary [Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978], 309).

1. March 25 is the Feast of the Annunciation (the announcement to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel that she was to give birth to the Son of God). Mikhail Weiskopf (Vaiskopf) has demonstrated that this story is imbued with Christian symbolism and is in a sense the story of Jesus’s life on earth; it is “a travesty of the Eucharist, or more precisely, of the entire Gospel narrative of the Incarnation” (Siuzhet Gogolia: morfologiia, ideologiia, kontekst [Moscow: Radiks, 1993], 229). Given this framework, I have translated the names of the streets into English, because several of the streets named in the story refer to events in the Christian calendar, in this case the Ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven on the fortieth day after the Resurrection. In the nineteenth century, barbers also engaged in medical practices such as pulling teeth and letting blood.

3. According to a decree of 1809, a titular councillor (rank 9) could be promoted to collegiate assessor (rank 8, which conferred hereditary nobility) only upon graduating from a university or passing a standardized test. Irina Reyfman points out that Kovalyov “was promoted to this rank speedily and without the required examination, in order to entice him and others like him to serve in the Caucasus during Russia’s conquest of the region” (How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016], 108). During his teaching career, Gogol himself attained the rank of collegiate assessor after passing an examination (Vinogradov 1: 29). See the Table of Ranks in the frontmatter.

7. The word for nose in Russian, “nos,” is of masculine gender, so the pronouns used for it can be translated as either “he” or “it,” which poses a problem for the translator. Given the vivid personification of the nose at this point in the story, I have chosen to translate the pronoun as “he.” When it returns to being regarded as just a nose, it becomes “it” again.

8. Gogol’s original version of the story had Kazan Cathedral as the location of the meeting between Kovalyov and his nose. When Gogol sent the story to his editor M. P. Pogodin in 1835, he wrote, “If by chance our stupid censorship insists that the Nose can’t be in the Kazan Church, then perhaps he can be moved to a Catholic church. But I don’t think that they have gotten as senile as that” (Academy PSS 10: 355). In fact, the censor did object to this location, and in versions of the story published in Gogol’s lifetime, this scene took place in the Gostiny Dvor shopping arcade rather than in any sort of church. The Kazan Cathedral was built in 1801–1811 and is located on the corner of Nevsky Avenue and the embankment of the Catherine Canal (now the Griboedov Canal).

10. In the original text, the bridge is called Anichkin Bridge, which is a colloquial name for Anichkov Bridge.

11. As with his misuse of the title major for himself, here Kovalyov is flattering his friend by using the army title lieutenant colonel instead of the correct civil service equivalent, court councillor.

12. The Senate was the highest government organ in the Russian Empire, supervising the activity of the civil service.

13. A droshky is a light, open, four-wheeled cart.

14. It was forbidden to advertise the sale of serfs in newspapers, so “being offered for service” is a euphemism. The strange business hours “eight to three in the morning” are in Gogol’s original.

15. Rappee (râpé) was a high-quality French snuff.

16. Subaltern officers were of the ranks from ensign to captain; staff officers were of the ranks from major to colonel.

17. The bel étage was the main, second floor of a building, where the most expensive and prestigious apartments were located.

18. Aqua regia is a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, called “royal water” because it can dissolve platinum, silver, and gold.

19. This character was called Palageya Grigoryevna earlier in the story.

20. Russian is rich in expressions using the word “nose,” such as the phrase I have translated as “to lead you around by the nose.” The phrase can be literally translated as “to remain with your nose,” meaning “to be left holding the bag.”

21. The phrase “experiments in the operation of magnetism” probably refers to activities inspired by the theories of Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), who developed a method for treating illness based on internal magnetic forces that he called “animal magnetism.” The phrase “dancing chairs” refers to rumors about spontaneously moving furniture in the home of an official of the Imperial Stables (from which Stables Street took its name), noted by Alexander Pushkin in his diary (and by other sources) in 1833.

22. Khosrow Mirza (1813–1875) was a Persian prince, the grandson of the shah, who was sent as the head of a diplomatic mission to the court of Nicholas I to apologize for the murder of Russia’s ambassador to Persia, the poet Alexander Griboedov, in January 1829. Khosrow Mirza made a grand entrance to St. Petersburg in August 1829 and stayed for more than two months, becoming a media sensation. During his stay in St. Petersburg he lived in the Tauride Palace, with its extensive adjacent gardens.

23. It should be noted that the title of the story in Russian, “Nos,” when read backward becomes “Son,” which means “dream.”

24. The trepak (or tropak) is a Ukrainian and Russian folk dance.

2. Like Albano, Castel Gandolfo is in the Alban Hills, on Lake Albano. The word minente (derived from eminente) refers to commoners who are sufficiently well off to dress in a showy and colorful manner. Although Gogol’s minenti are apparently men, the word more often refers to women. Frascati is another town in the Alban Hills near Albano.

3. Gogol’s references in this story reflect his keen interest in the artistic treasures that can be viewed in Rome. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), called Il Guercino (“the Squinter”), was born in Cento but was active in Rome in 1621–1623, where he painted the important fresco Aurora in the Villa Ludovisi. Annibale Caracci (1560–1609) and his brother Agostino (1557–1602) were Bolognese artists who painted magnificent frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Their cousin Ludovico (1555–1619) was a major influence on Guercino. Gogol brought home to Russia a copy of a depiction of the Savior by Annibale Caracci, which is now in a museum in Gogol’s birthplace.

4. Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) was a scholar and cardinal who helped to codify Italian as a literary language based on the Tuscan dialect. His letters are considered masterpieces of Latin style. Giovanni della Casa (1503–1556) was a Florentine poet and prose writer, known for his posthumously published treatise on polite behavior, Il Galateo overo de’ costumi (1558). Olio di ricino is castor oil, used since ancient times as a laxative.

7. The July Revolution of 1830 in France deposed the Bourbon king Charles X and brought Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, to the throne in a constitutional monarchy. After the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, Italy was largely under the control of the Austrian Empire. There was a series of insurrections in 1830 in various parts of what is now Italy.

8. The omnibus was a large horse-drawn carriage on springs that could carry about fifteen to twenty passengers. Paris had regular omnibus service beginning in 1828. Paris was known for its glass-ceilinged, artificially illuminated arcades for pedestrian shopping. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Galerie d’Orléans at the Palais Royal, built 1828–1830. The landmarks of Paris that are foregrounded here are key signs of the city as the vanguard of progress and modernity.

9. Gogol uses the word bottega to refer to a servant in an osteria. Modern Italian dictionaries define bottega as “shop.” But in Karl Baedeker, Italy. Handbook for Travelers, we find, “The waiter of a restaurant is called cameriere, that of an osteria bottega” (Vol. 2: Central Italy and Rome [Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1875], 82). The Diario di Roma was founded in 1714; beginning in 1814 it was the official gazette of the Papal States but also provided news on literature and culture. Il Pirata (not Pirato, as Gogol has it) was a twice-weekly journal published in Milan from 1835 to 1891. It covered literature, art, and theater. Thermopylae was a battle between Persians and Greeks in 480 BCE. Darius I the Great (550–486 BCE) was one of the most powerful Persian kings.

10. “The Chambers” refers to the French bicameral legislature. In 1830–1848 these were the Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies.

11. I have not been able to determine what “crocodiles” refers to.

12. French vaudeville was a comic genre that incorporated song, dance, and satirical verses. Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) was a Venetian dramatist, the author of classic comedies.

13. Gogol’s quotation of this verse attributed to Count Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803) is inaccurate. The verse actually reads: “Tutto fanno, e nulla sanno, / Tutto sanno, e nulla fanno; / Gira, volta, è son Francesi, / Più li pesi, men ti danno” (They do everything, they know nothing, they know everything, they do nothing; the French are scatterbrains, the more you weigh out to them, the less they give you for it).

14. The editors of PSS 2009 point out that Gogol had a similar idea about the relationship between the French and the Slavs. In an untitled and unpublished introduction from the 1840s to a Russian translation of Prosper Mérimée, Gogol wrote, “To feel and divine the Slavic spirit is too much and almost impossible for a Frenchman. By their nature these two nations are unable to harmonize in character.”

15. Gogol’s friend A. O. Smirnova recalled that he arranged so that all of their walks ended at St. Peter’s Basilica and that he told her he had spent many hours lying on the dome’s interior cornice at the base of its drum, marveling at the genius of Michelangelo. In a way, Gogol had moved from one “city of St. Peter” to another in his move from St. Petersburg to Rome, and his engagement with the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica has a deeper significance than mere touristic interest.

16. The Ponte Molle is a bridge over the Tiber north of Rome. The Piazza del Popolo is a major square adjacent to the northern gate into Rome, the Porta del Popolo. It marks the beginning of the Via del Corso, mentioned earlier in the story and also toward the end. Monte Pincio or the Pincian Hill is in the northeast part of Rome and is the site of the Villa Borghese, mentioned earlier in the story.

17. The Palazzo Ruspoli is a sixteenth-century palace on the Via del Corso. The oldest part of the Palazzo Colonna in central Rome dates to the thirteenth century. The Palazzo Sciarra is a sixteenth-century palace on the Via del Corso. The Palazzo Doria Pamphilj is a seventeenth-century palace on the Via del Corso.

18. Donato Bramante (1444–1514) was the original architect for the new St. Peter’s Basilica commissioned by Pope Julius II.

19. The phrase “how he could maintain con onore i doveri di marito” means “how he could maintain with honor the duties of a husband,” in other words, his conjugal duties.

20. “Fools” is a popular card game (similar to the Russian game durak) based on getting rid of all the cards in one’s hand; the player left with cards is the “fool.”

21. The term “Middle Ages” as Gogol uses it here seems to refer to the period now called the Renaissance, a term which was coined in its present sense by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1855, after Gogol’s death.

22. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was an architect and sculptor known for the dramatic inventiveness of his Baroque style.

23. Like Bernini, Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) was an exponent of the Roman Baroque style of architecture. Several of the other artists mentioned here are associated with St. Peter’s Basilica. “Sangallo” may refer to the architects Giuliano da Sangallo (1445–1516), Antonio da Sangallo the Elder (1453–1534), or Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484–1546), the last of whom helped to design and construct St. Peter’s Basilica. Giacomo della Porta (1532–1602) completed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, in collaboration with Domenico Fontana (1543–1607). Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573) also worked on St. Peter’s Basilica.

24. Gogol had spoken about the pettiness of the nineteenth century in his essay “Sculpture, Painting, and Music” (1834), in the collection Arabesques, referring to “all the fragmentation of whims and amusements that our nineteenth century racks its brains over.”

25. The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin is an offshoot of the Franciscans. Franciscans wear brown robes.

26. The term “cinquecento” refers to the sixteenth century, and by extension the Italian art of that century. I have not found any sources attesting to a garment by this name.

27. Gogol is describing the Roman Campagna, the low-lying area surrounding Rome. The area was associated both with the spread of disease (malaria) and with the highly influential landscape painting of Claude Lorrain (Gellée, 1604/5–1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). Gogol’s descriptions here seem to be attempting to accomplish in words what these painters created in visual art.

28. The eastern facade of St. John Lateran is topped by fifteen large statues, including Jesus, John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist.

29. The editors of PSS 2009 note that P. V. Annenkov and F. I. Iordan both recount in their memoirs that they spent an evening with Gogol at a villa in Albano and admired a marvelous sunset in the Roman Campagna. This evening followed soon after the death of their acquaintance, the young architect M. A. Tomarinsky, from a rapidly progressing fever in the spring of 1841.

30. The phrase “a whole city of kingly merchants” refers to Venice, which became a center of world trade in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In an 1833 essay on the teaching of history, Gogol called it “this queen of the seas, this marvelous republic, with such an intricate and unusually organized government.”

31. This refers to Christopher Columbus. In the essay on history, Gogol wrote that Columbus killed the trade of Venice by discovering the New World.

32. Quirites was an ancient name for the citizens of Rome.

33. Genzano is another town in the Alban Hills. Since 1778 it has had a June festival called Infiorata, in which one of its streets is carpeted with flowers woven into intricate designs. Gogol described the festival in a letter to his sisters in 1838.

34. Memoirists of the nineteenth century offer similar descriptions of the elaborate decorations in the shops of the pizzicaroli in Rome on Easter Saturday, as the Lenten fast is about to end. For example: “In one shop we saw St. Paul irradiated by a glory of sausages; and in another the ill-boding bird of St. Peter, hung up with the apostle it had warned in vain; Madonnas curiously carved in butter, and Bambinos in lard, warmed the devotion of the inward man; and every eatable of plastic consistence, or of malleable form, was pressed into the service of architectural decoration and symbolic piety.” “Italy,” in Atheneum, or Spirit of the English Magazines, vol. 10, 1821, p. 21.

35. The Greek Anthology was a collection of mostly brief poems from the classical and Byzantine periods, often of a sensual nature.

36. The Signoria was the governing body of the city.

37. Throwing flour to mark the end of Carnival and beginning of Lent is an ancient tradition. Harlequin and Columbine are characters in the Commedia dell’arte, a form of semi-improvisatory theater that began in Italy in the sixteenth century. In a letter from Rome of February 2, 1838, to A. S. Danilevsky, Gogol describes the Roman Carnival: “Now is the time of Carnival: Rome is going on an all-out spree. The Carnival is an amazing phenomenon in Italy, and especially in Rome—absolutely everyone is out on the street, everyone is in masks. The person who has no possibility of getting dressed up in costume turns his sheepskin coat inside out or smears his mug with soot. Whole trees and flower gardens ride along the streets, often a cart will drag by all covered in leaves and garlands, its wheels decorated with leaves and branches [….] The Corso is covered with snow from the flour that has been thrown. I heard about the confetti, I never realized it could be so good. Just imagine, you can pour out a whole bag of flour into the face of the prettiest woman, even if she is a Borghese, and she won’t get angry but will pay you back in kind. The fops and gentlemen spend several hundred scudi apiece on flour alone. [….] It’s an amazing freedom, which would probably send you into raptures. You can speak and give flowers to decidedly any woman you wish. You can even get into the carriage and sit down among them. [….] All the beautiful women of Rome have now floated to the surface, there is such a multitude of them now, and God only knows where they came from. I had never encountered them before; they are all strangers” (Academy PSS 11: 122).

38. Gogol’s footnote: “In Italian poetry there is a type of poem known as a sonnet with a tail (con la coda)—when there isn’t enough room in the poem for the idea, and it carries after it an addition that is often longer than the sonnet itself.”

39. Gogol’s footnote: “The Romans call everyone who does not live in Rome foreigners (forestieri), even if they live only ten miles from the city.”

40. The Ave Maria (Hail Mary) is part of the Angelus devotion, which would be recited in the morning, at noon, and in the evening.

41. Luke 11:33 (King James Version): “No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light.”

42. “Siora” and “Sior” are colloquial versions of Signora and Signor, probably more characteristic of northern Italy than of Rome.

43. I have taken the liberty of restoring a censored passage here. The passage beginning “There were models” and ending with “make a confession about it” was censored from the original 1842 publication in the journal Moskvitianin and was not restored in subsequent publications (A. S. Bodrova, “…Popravki byli vazhnye…”: K istorii teksta povesti N. V. Gogolia ‘Rim,’ ” in Gogol’: Materialy i issledovaniia [Moscow, 2009], no. 2, p. 10).

44. The Church of St. Ignatius Loyola is a seventeenth-century church in the center of Rome. Tre Ladroni means “three bandits.” Via della Stamperia is the Street of the Printers, near the Trevi Fountain. The Trinità dei Monti church is situated at the top of the Spanish Steps, leading down to the Piazza di Spagna. For most of his time in Rome, Gogol lived nearby, on the present-day Via Sistina.

45. As a result of a papal bull of 1555, Jews were required to live in the walled section of the city known as the Ghetto. This restriction was maintained, with brief interruptions, until the mid-nineteenth century.

46. The Trastevere (“across the Tiber”) neighborhood is on the west side of the Tiber. The church of San Pietro in Montorio is on the southwest outskirts of Rome.

47. The “Antonino column” refers to the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which is crowned by a bronze statue of St. Paul.

48. The Carnival in Rome culminated in races by riderless horses along the Via del Corso.

1. Titular councillor is rank 9 in the Table of Ranks (see frontmatter). Since promotion to rank 8 conferred hereditary nobility, many civil servants remained “stuck” at rank 9. Irina Reyfman argues that “Akaky’s service abilities are so obviously deficient that his having this rank is simply not plausible,” and that for a “lowly scribe” the rank of collegiate registrar (rank 14) would be more appropriate (How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016], 113).

3. Russian Orthodox believers choose their children’s names from the Calendar of Saints. The person would celebrate his or her “name day” on the day dedicated to the saint for which he or she was named. Most of the names listed here are the names of actual saints. But none of them is a commonly used Russian name, and they all (including Akaky) sound outlandish and funny to a Russian ear. The name Akaky is from the Greek name Akakios (Latin Acacius) and is the name of several saints. Many scholars, beginning with F. C. Driessen, have drawn parallels between Akaky’s story and the hagiographical tradition. (Driessen, Gogol as a Short-Story Writer [The Hague: Mouton, 1965], 182–214.) Simon Karlinsky has pointed out that the name Akaky derives from a Greek word meaning “immaculate” or “without blemish,” but also sounds like the Russian word okakat’, “to cover with excrement.” (The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976], 137.)

5. Sturmwhist is a German variant of the English trick-taking card game whist. “Fortress governor” refers to the governor of the Fortress of Sts. Peter and Paul. “Falconet’s monument” refers to the “Bronze Horseman,” the equestrian statue erected in 1782 in the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, dedicated to Peter I by Catherine II and created by Étienne Maurice Falconet (1716–1791).

7. The critic Dmitry Chizhevsky writes, “The only thing that Akaky Akakievich sees at the moment when the matter of a new overcoat is being decided, is precisely this faceless general, and the Devil is faceless. As someone who was well read in religious literature, as a connoisseur and collector of folklore materials—popular songs and legends—Gogol of course knew about the Christian and folk tradition that the Devil is faceless.” (“About Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974], 320.)

10. The word for “calm,” pokoinyi, can also be translated as “deceased,” thus adding to the strange image of Akaky’s heart only now beginning to beat.

11. The editors of PSS 2009 point out that in his notebooks for September 1841, Gogol described markets in St. Petersburg at which cats were sold for fur, with gray cats being the most desirable, presumably because they could be “mistaken for marten.”

12. The expression translated here as “significant personage” is znachitel’noe litso in Russian. The word litso can mean “personage,” which is clearly the primary meaning here, but it also means “face.” The significance of the human face as a representation of the whole personality is an important theme in Gogol’s works (most notably “The Nose”), but there is no English word that can convey this secondary meaning in the context of “The Overcoat.”