Nicholas Lezard's choice

Face to face with Kovalev's nose

Nicholas Lezard on the enduring appeal of The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(Granta, £7.99)

I know of no impending anniversary that could help with the marketing of a new translation of Gogol's stories. If it helps, March 4 last year was the 150th anniversary of his death. But Gogol is strangely timeless. This is not to say that a modern reader can easily navigate him without footnotes, for there are plenty of period details - inescapably so for such a scrutineer of minutiae (the lid of a snuff-box whose picture has been covered over with a square of paper, the watermelon rinds thrown out of windows). But Gogol's occasional weirdness is just as weird today, of such a strange order of invention, that even a word like "exuberant" doesn't begin to cover it.

Take one of his two most celebrated stories, "The Nose". A barber finds a nose in his bread roll one morning. He recognises it as belonging to one of his customers, Platon Kovalev. Terrified that he had pulled it off somehow while shaving him, he tries to throw it in the Neva, but is apprehended by a policeman. The action then shifts to Kovalev, the puffed-up civil servant with a smooth, featureless gap in his face. He is astonished to see the Nose "in a gold-embroidered uniform with a big standing collar; he had kidskin trousers on; at his side hung a sword. From his plumed hat it could be concluded that he belonged to the rank of state councillor." And when Kovalev confronts the Nose in church, the Nose cuts him dead with the full disdain of a superior.

The straightforward explanation is that the story is a satire of ambition, or the nuances of rank; but there is so much else going on. Gogol is having an exceptional amount of fun with the reader, and his ending is as remarkable as anything any fancy-pants postmodernist has ever come up with: "But what is strangest, what is most incomprehensible of all is how authors can choose such subjects... I confess, that is utterly inconceivable, it is simply... no, no, I utterly fail to understand. In the first place, there is decidedly no benefit to the Fatherland; in the second... but in the second place there is also no benefit. I simply do not know what it..." (All the aposiopeses, incidentally, are Gogol's.)

In "The Overcoat" we have one of the first of literature's anonymous drudges, the clerks who copy endless documents, anticipating the bureaucratic nightmares of Kafka: "Once, as he was copying a paper, he even nearly made a mistake, so that he cried 'Oh!' almost aloud and crossed himself." When you get to the end of the story, you will see sentimentality avoided at full throttle, and something richer and stranger put in its place.

Not all the tales are here. The title should instead read Selected Tales . That isn't something to grumble about, as Gogol's early stories can be somewhat painful in comparison with his works of fully realised genius. "When I want a good nightmare," said Nabokov in his book on Gogol, "I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of... stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dnepr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks." But there's enough here to make you agree with Nabokov when he writes: "At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships."

Today's best video

Today in pictures