For how could the nose, which had been on his face but yesterday, and able then neither to drive nor to walk independently, now be going about in uniform?
We take a break from reading novels and take a quick nose dive into Gogol’s famous 1830s short story, talking absurdity, bureaucracy, and Russian wives.
Status and bureaucracies: The most straight forward reading is a satire 19th century Russian bureaucracies and status seeking. Benny outlines outlines the table of ranks and the boys consider the pros and cons.
Inconsistencies and the absurd: Rich is frustrated with the lack of internal inconsistency and doesn’t buy George Saunders defence of the story as self-aware of its limitations.
Gogol’s nose: Perhaps the story can be understood via a more personal lens. Benny points out Gogol’s insecurities about his own noise which may be reflected in Major Kovalyov’s obsession with his appearance.
Chitter chatter
Cam: Welcome to the Book Club Podcast, Do You Even Lit? This week, we take a break from reading novels and dive into Nikolai Gogol’s 1830s short story, The Nose. We discuss Russian bureaucracy and the impacts of the table of ranks system, Gogol’s potential insecurities about his body, which of the Do You Even Lit boys is Cam, and we predict whether this story will be Rich’s cup of tea. We established that indeed I am Cam. And as always, I’m joined by my friend Rich, my fellow Kiwi, and our Canadian friend Benny. Let’s get into it.
Benny: All right, well, in podcast news, Richie boy got married. So if the tenor of the podcast changes now and he looks down at Cam and I for not being true men, then that’s exactly what happened.
Rich: Sorry, ladies, sorry — it’s all over for you.
Benny: We’ve lost half of our audience.
Rich: Yeah, our enormous female fan base.
Cam: Turns out half our audience was at Richard’s wedding. It’s good to know who actually listens to it.
Rich: Did a few people recognize your beautiful voice, Cam?
Cam: Yeah, there’s a couple, although usually people mix Richard and Cam’s voice up. I don’t know why I just made that even more — do you know my embarrassing reason why I did that? It’s because I forgot whether it was Rich and me or Rich and I, you know, that hyper-correction. So then I went for Rich and Cam. So I am Cam, but anyway, like, I am Sam.
Rich: Yeah, yeah, it’s a Michael Scott moment. I think you went full retard.
Cam: Someone mixed up Benny and me.
Rich: What, Benny and your voice?
Cam: Yeah, which I was like, come on, he’s American.
Rich: Yeah, that’s impossible.
Cam: At the wedding, yeah, a New Zealander. Well, since he knew you, I was like, you’re the one guy that won’t mix Richard and me up, and then he’s like, yeah, I mix up you and Benny.
Benny: Wow.
Rich: Yeah. I think some people have, like, you know, face blindness but for voices — maybe I even have it, because it took me so long to learn who was Dave and who was Tamler on Very Bad Wizards, even though their voices are totally —
Benny: Yeah, I don’t know. You have to be kind of dedicated to really lock into who’s who. It’s going to take months or years. And I don’t want any listeners who aren’t prepared to make that journey with us.
Benny: I think three probably makes it, you know, it’s almost exponentially harder than two. And then four, I wouldn’t even want to go there.
Cam: It’d be funny if some listeners think there are four of us or more. So, New Year’s resolution: call ourselves by our names Pokemon style, just totally speaking.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. You know who’s really good at that is the boys from The Rest is History, at least the one that’s not Tom.
Rich: They can’t be that good if you don’t know his name.
Cam: So the one that’s not Tom always says Tom’s name when he’s asking him to say something, which is great, but Tom doesn’t do it vice versa, so I don’t actually know who the other host is. Damien, maybe.
Benny: Tom doesn’t know his name and it’s gone so far that it’s like way too embarrassing to ask.
Cam: There’s this person at work that’s like that for me and I can’t even find them in the system.
Rich: Hey… mate.
Cam: Australia’s and New Zealand’s good because you can call everyone mate, including women.
Benny: Oh, really?
Cam: Yeah.
Benny: Oh, that’s great.
Cam: I love that Richard said that in the vow. Oh, mate.
Benny: Yeah, did you guys write your own vows?
Rich: Yes.
Cam: I think Richard’s speech was like top five at the wedding. Top five at the wedding of all weddings — and I said that at the wedding.
Rich: Daddy Deutsch got a little oblique shout-out.
Cam: Yeah, what was the line, like a mini-universal thing?
Rich: I said, like, we’re always at the beginning of infinity, and I said that, you know, I will choose you in this world and every other world and every timeline. Probably not factually true, but that’s okay. I’ll choose you in over 50%.
Cam: That would be a real rationalist reading, wouldn’t it?
Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, you’re right, that’s a lie, that’s a goddamn lie. But the other thing I was saying is that, like, as time goes on — actually more of a Parfitian point — we will just be two different people. I said I’m marrying like so many different people right now, it’s like exciting to always be changing and growing.
Cam: Maybe Benny can text back that one he’s saying about the multiple personalities.
Benny: I actually don’t know who you’re talking about, but yeah.
Rich: And then I heard the Very Bad Wizards picked Perfect Days as their movie of the year, even though technically it came out in 2023. So that makes me feel good, because I think — is it Tamler? — has really good taste in films, right? He’s actually a film head, whereas I’m a filthy casual.
Cam: Yeah, you’re the Dave Pizarro of this podcast.
Benny: Yeah. Must be nice to be a philosophy professor, you know.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, and I think they’re not expected to publish that much. I mean, some of them just do. I had this crank economics professor that they couldn’t flip because of tenure. He’s just like, never published, and like everyone hated him as a teacher.
Benny: Are you totally untouchable when you’re tenured?
Rich: Not if you don’t want to leave. So even — I think all the stuff that happened around Dan Ariely, do you guys remember this from a few years ago?
Cam: Yeah. He discovered something new, right?
Benny: Yeah, it’s all the data fraudulent stuff. And I think he’s just still tenured at Duke. I think Duke probably asked him to resign or step down or something. And I think he just said no. And if you’re tenured, that’s all they can do, really.
Rich: What about, like, academic malpractice or something?
Benny: You’d think that that would be enough, but maybe it wasn’t clear cut enough because he still maintains his innocence, right? Even though he 100% did it. But I think maybe he’s still being prosecuted or something. I don’t know where all that stuff is with Data Colada.
Rich: Yeah, but it’s like a parallel ecosystem, right? Of not optimizing for finding out true things about psychology, but optimizing for something slightly different, which is like getting invited to TED talks and getting big names on your paper and getting appointed to some chair of some position or something, which can come from doing good science, but can also come from just punching fake numbers into an Excel sheet.
We’re the only true voices of reason and integrity.
Benny: Objectivity. Can’t publish false science if you are not a scientist and don’t make any contributions at all.
Cam: If you only talk about other people’s books. All right, speaking of, we dive into this bad boy. Did you read the book Benny?
Benny: Fuck you, Cam. Also, I’m ahead of you in the Odyssey, so shut the fuck up.
Cam: 2025 is my year, baby.
Benny: He’s a new man. Also, I’ve got the Anki deck going for Greek mythology, and I’ll wipe the floor with you guys in those episodes. It’s just gonna be me soliloquizing about the Titanomachy or whatever, between the Titans and the Olympians.
Rich: I can’t wait to edit out all the fun facts and the mispronunciations. Do you want to say a bit about it, Benny? What are we reading?
Quick summary of The Nose
Benny: Oh, we start — okay, so today we’re doing The Nose by Nikolai Gogol, which is a very famous satirical short story written by him in his usual witty style, written in 1835, I think. And it’s — I mean, one, it’s hilarious to read. So if you haven’t read it, it’s honestly like 12 pages long or something, very fast read, single sitting, you can just sit down. And at least the translation I read was very modern, easy to follow, and hilarious. So you’re like, you know, there’s a couple of places where I was literally chuckling out loud to myself. So it’s worth just reading before the discussion if you haven’t.
Rich: It’s 28 pages long, just wanted to warn the readers. A slightly longer single sitting.
Benny: Yes, maybe two seconds, as long as you read faster than Cam, which basically 95% of the population does, you’ll be fine.
Cam: I do have this one memory in high school — we had to record our reading. I remember one time I put in 60 pages, like 60-plus for the day.
Rich: Damn, you peaked so young.
Cam: Recently I was just reading a book, I had 60 pages of Proust in the memory.
Rich: Do you already have your special rounding scheme at that age?
Cam: Yeah. Um, Benny, do you want to just gloss the plot? It’s pretty straightforward.
Benny: Yeah, yeah, so it’s broken into three parts. In part one, a barber named Ivan Yakovlevich, something Ivan, is eating breakfast and he notices that in the middle of his loaf of bread is someone’s nose. And being a barber, naturally, he recognizes the nose straight away as that of his client, Kovalev. Apparently he’s good at recognizing noses because he holds onto the person’s nose as he shaves them. So naturally, he knows everyone’s nose in the city of St. Petersburg. And he’s freaked out by this. He takes the nose outside and chucks it away into a river.
Cam: And his wife’s annoyed, right?
Benny: Well, his wife seems like sort of a standard Russian wife of that time. And it’s kind of unclear what’s going on there.
Rich: Every Russian housewife — extremely, you know, henpecks their husband and sort of bullies them and berates them. There’s definitely a theme that emerges from this era.
Cam: I know, right? Sort of chasing them around with a broom and calling them idiots and dunderheads and stuff.
Benny: But she’s like, get this nose the fuck out of my house. He wants to leave it in the corner or something and just have a think — she’s like, no. And she immediately blames the mate. It’s like, nose appears in his breakfast — she’s, “I knew you—”
Cam: Yeah, bitch, you baked the bread. Yeah, how’d this get in here?
Benny: Okay, so then part two is from Kovalev’s perspective, and he wakes up one morning and realizes he doesn’t have a nose, and in short realizes his nose is gallivanting about town dressed as someone who’s more advanced than him socially. So I think we’ll dive into the whole social ranking system a bit later, but basically his nose is traipsing around town and he’s like built a life for himself, and this guy’s running around, you know, asking after his nose, trying to find his nose, begging with his nose to come get back on his face, which he doesn’t, and he basically loses his nose. And then the whole town realizes that this guy’s nose is running around, and everyone wants to see it. So part two are Kovalev’s struggles. And then part three, the nose miraculously appears back on Kovalev’s face. And then the author notes at the end that this was a very bizarre story and something that was odd to write about, and questions any author who would actually write about such an odd subject. And then that’s the end. And he just goes back to his normal life and starts like chasing tail and trying to improve his social station, and he learns nothing and doesn’t change in any conceivable way.
Rich: Was this the first time you guys had read this?
Benny: Yes, for me. My first Gogol.
Cam: And what’d you think? Did you like it?
Is this story even good?
Benny: I wasn’t crazy about it, I gotta be completely honest. It didn’t do all that much for me.
Cam: Yeah, I keep thinking, what would Beckett think of this? And what would Richard think? Exactly.
Rich: Yeah, it was a Beckett redux. Yeah, it’s very much in the absurdist genre. Yeah, more happened. Okay, so quite deliberately, there’s no internal coherency to the story. So for instance, the barber finds the normal-sized human nose in his loaf of bread. But then later on when — what’s the main guy’s name, Kovalev or Kovalyov? — so when Kovalev encounters the nose, it’s like a full man-sized nose. There’s no explanation given as to why that should be the case.
Cam: Except for when he gets the nose back, and then it’s back again to being a nose that he can’t affix to his face.
Rich: Yeah, but like there’s no one in the story, neither the characters, Kovalev, nor the narrator, makes any effort to explain the incongruity, or that’s just one of like everything in the story. It’s got dream logic. And I think I don’t really like that. You know, like I love fantasy where the key to good fantasy is you take a system and you tweak one thing and then you see what falls out from tweaking that one thing, but it maintains its own internal self-consistency. So it’s like magic in some way or different to our world in some way, but it must follow its own set of rules.
And I think that’s what I’m not wild about with magical realism and things like this. This absurdism is like dream logic. Anything can happen. It’s kind of like that problem-solving problem I had with Beckett where it’s like problems are not well formed and the solutions are extremely easy to vary. Yeah, I don’t know. How do you guys feel about that?
Cam: You don’t like the inconsistencies. But there’s also like a, you know, people’s reactions to losing his nose — so Ivan finds the nose and his wife finds the nose and they’re annoyed about it, but it’s not like, you know, you’d be terrified. Kovalev loses his nose and he kind of acts like it’s annoying, but it’s just like an inconvenience, right? And everyone he talks to — like he talks to the police chief, talks to the newspaper clerk, talks to another policeman and the doctor, and everyone’s just kind of acting like, I don’t know, lost his sunglasses. Like, are you saying that annoys you, or like, that’s the kind of one thing that can change and that’s all right, but then also in this story there’s a bunch of inconsistencies as well, like on top?
Rich: Yeah, it doesn’t even keep that frame. It’s hard to even imagine what the nose looks like — like suddenly the nose is said to be like the size of a person, like wearing clothes, and it talks and walks, you know.
Benny: What it reminds me of is it reminds me of The Metamorphosis of Kafka and how he wakes up transformed into a bug and one of his first thoughts is, “Oh shit, I’m gonna be late for work,” right? And then I remember feeling aggrieved about that at the time, but I think that’s fine. That’s the genre. Part of the fun of it is the absurdity of people’s reactions of missing what in a truly realist text would be that, you know, the real true reaction — that’s not the point. I don’t have a problem with the fact that the newspaper clerk is like, “So, one of your serfs ran away?” “I missed a nose, was it?” And just like doesn’t understand. And even when he shows him his flat-ass face with the nose missing, he’s not like gasping and, you know, like totally shocked. He’s just like, “Okay, that’s pretty weird.”
Rich: It’s more the sense that anything could happen in this world and you will never be able to understand the rule set that created this chain of events because there is none. And it’s like very obvious that there is none and you’d be foolish to try and find it. Maybe other people successfully managed to go one step further and embrace that in the same way that I’m okay with embracing people’s funny reactions or lack of reactions to the events. But yeah, like, I mean, how did you guys feel about that, or about magical realism in general, I suppose, or, you know, things of this nature? So, Benny, sorry, I gotta start addressing it to one person.
Benny: Yeah, so I didn’t mind it. Normally, I would agree with you if we were reading a book. So I certainly wouldn’t want to read a 300-page book written — 12 pages is fine.
Cam: Yeah.
Benny: Where the internal logic is all over the place. But for a short story that’s probably trying to get one main point across and mostly be about laughs, I find I didn’t mind it. I could put up with it for 28 pages. And, you know, it’s not as if I found it to be the most profound short story I’ve ever read. And, you know, I don’t think there’s actually as much here as there was in some of the Chekhov stories that we read. For instance, the main reading I got from this was like satire about the obsession over social rank in czarist Russia. I think that’s probably the most straightforward reading. And that’s sort of all I was able to get out of it. Maybe there’s a bit more if you keep digging. But, you know, as a short story that’s trying to point out some of the absurdities with that, I think writing it in like this absurd magical way is sort of the right tool for the job there. And so I didn’t mind it on that account. What about you, Cam?
Absurdism and surrealism
Cam: Yeah, I liked it. I mean, I don’t hate absurdism as much as Rich. Do you reckon this is the first absurdist work? I mean, I suppose ChatGPT will tell us.
Rich: No, this is post-Kafka. This is like inferior Kafka, and it’s 20 years later.
Cam: No, this is 1830s, I thought.
Rich: And Kafka’s like — yeah, oh, is it? Yeah. No, this influenced them all, I think. Oh, I’ve got that backwards. This is old. It was about our median reader, I think you said. 1830 with my rounding system. Oh, so Kafka is riffing on Gogol. Yeah, no, you’re right. Oh, I feel differently about it now, I guess. That’s my favorite book. No, I was just thinking, like, Kafka did it much better and earlier, but I’ve flipped them in my head for some reason.
Cam: To be fair, just to the absurdism remark, I don’t think this counts as absurdism in the same way that Camus, for instance, would, like — this is absurd on the face of it, like I feel like surrealism or magical realism is a better way of describing this than actual absurdism, right? Because this is less dealing with, like, trying to find meaning in a meaningless universe.
Rich: There is an element of that. I mean, it also satirizes the bureaucracy, right? So, like, when he’s —
Cam: Yeah, for sure. In that second part when Kovalev is trying to get his nose back, he first goes to the police inspector, who isn’t there, he like misses him by a minute, and then he goes to the newspaper clerk, who like misunderstands him, you know, he’s like saying, “Oh, did Mr. Nosov steal your thing?” and then he finally kind of figures it out, and he wants to run an ad to find it, but the newspaper clerk doesn’t want to. He’s like, “This is too crazy for the newspaper, you should just go to the doctor.” And then he goes to the doctor, and the doctor like doesn’t want to put it on for him, and he wants to buy it off him. And then he suddenly gets in his head that it’s this woman’s fault, Podtochina or something, and he thinks she’s a witch, and he writes to her, but like she misunderstands the letter. There’s a kind of satirical element of the bureaucracy of thing. So there’s like an absurd element and the kind of existentialist absurd as well, but it’s mainly, I think, surreal.
Rich: Yeah, and once again, it’s like in a dream, right? It’s like the language problem where you try to scream and nothing comes out in a dream, or you’re desperately trying to tell someone something and your words are all garbled. It’s very much like that. Like you’re talking underwater. And yeah, he’s having all these interactions with people that should be pretty straightforward and they just keep getting frustrated by these weird misunderstandings. Even the barber at the start, he’s run out into the street to get rid of the nose and he can’t get rid of it. Like everywhere he goes, he keeps running into his friend, he can’t find a spare moment. He drops it into the river, or tries to, and a policeman — oh, no, he drops it on the ground, and a policeman sees and makes him pick it back up. And I don’t know, something about that to me is very dreamlike, where you’re trying to do something and you just can’t do it, just keep getting frustrated over and over.
Cam: Whenever I lucid dream, I cannot then control it and I can’t escape it, and it’s kind of like turns into a fucking nightmare. Although I’ve got my nose.
Rich: Wait, isn’t lucid dreaming definitionally that you can control it?
Cam: I think many people who become aware that they’re dreaming can control it, and that’s why they essentially do it, but I can’t.
Rich: Oh, so you become aware you’re dreaming and you can’t control it? Like, you can’t do anything?
Cam: Yeah, I try to do stuff and I don’t have control over it, so I’m just like in this fucking nightmare, and I’m aware it’s a nightmare, and then I try to wake up and I can’t, and I have to kind of force myself out of my face, and I eventually do. It’s like I feel like I’m coming through my skin, and then I wake up.
Benny: Whoa, that’s crazy, dude. So you’re just trapped in your own head, like just watching things unfold.
Cam: Yeah, I suppose. Yeah.
Rich: That’s why I was late this morning.
Benny: Couldn’t get out of his head.
Rich: Yeah. Yeah. It was 8 AM. Trying to wake up. Yeah.
Cam: But the start there where he’s kind of running around — the barber who finds Ivan and finds the nose in his bread, and I found that kind of funny. And I kind of thought, like, a lot of humor doesn’t last, especially like almost 200 years. But he’s got this nose and his wife’s like immediately giving him a hard time about his nose and his breakfast. He’s like paranoid. She’s like, “You gotta get rid of that.” He’s kind of like, he’s going around, he’s got it like in his handkerchief. It’s so surreal — wait, like, why is he paranoid that someone’s going to catch him with his nose? But then like there are cops, there’s like cops asking him about it, like, “What’s that you got there?”
Rich: Yeah, he’s just trying to ditch it.
Cam: And bumping into people he knows. Everyone accepts the premise, right? His wife or someone suggests, “Oh, well clearly you must have cut someone’s nose off when you were barbering them.” And he’s like, “I guess maybe I did.” And he tries to remember if he was drunk the night before and he’s like, “I don’t know.” He doesn’t even know if he was drunk.
Rich: What the hell? Yeah, he just rolls with everything in this story. Like, you’re so suggestible — like, you could slice someone’s nose off their face and not remember whether or not you did it?
Benny: Well, yeah, I guess that gets to the question of whether you consider this as metaphor or whether you consider this as really about someone’s nose. And I mean, you could make an argument that it’s just surreal — they’re like, this is just surrealism and that was the point.
Cam: Yeah, but there’s obviously some metaphorical readings. I did want to say something — do you guys get this thing where you, like, read a classic and then you read the commentary around it, and then it’s hard to shake those readings but they weren’t necessarily your readings of it, and you feel a bit fake or like plagiaristic? Do you guys ever get that? Because we’re probably going to talk about a few of the readings, which probably some of them we got from Wikipedia.
Benny: Yeah, I feel like that if I had a reading of my own and then I come across people who like totally destroy my reading of it, or they’re like, “A naive reading of it would suggest X,” and I had thought X, and then you sort of give up because now you don’t want to come across as naive. But normally, if it’s just a different reading, then I don’t mind because it’s just more arrows in the quiver, so to speak.
George Saunders defends The Nose
Rich: Yeah, for a book like this, which I didn’t really enjoy on its own terms, I’m all about finding the readings to try and figure out what I missed. So I haven’t read around this at all, except as soon as I finished, I looked up George Saunders to see what he said about it. And he didn’t win me over. I almost dare to disagree with him about this story.
Cam: What was his quick take on it?
Rich: Basically he says these are signs of an amateur or lesser writer — the lack of consistency and the weird shifts in tone and style and how the lack of narrative — I can’t remember the term he uses — but the fact that the story is not even aware of its own gaps and problems. And his claim is that Gogol is imitating this tradition within Russian writing called skaz, I think, and it’s this sort of lowbrow slapstick sort of Sacha Baron Cohen silliness, and that Gogol is like imitating a bad writer. And he says something like, “It just works so well that you just go with it and you’re just delighted anyway.” And I was like, no, I wasn’t delighted, it didn’t work for me. He doesn’t actually justify it. He just says, like, it’s so good therefore he’s allowed to do all these bad — rule-breaking, all the rules.
There’s an argument also that he doesn’t usually break these sort of rules. He usually demonstrates he’s a very strong writer. I think he argues that he can turn it on and off at will, and that there’s like sections of the story which are really good, or where he reveals that he is in fact imitating someone within this particular tradition. And he also says something about how, you know, that last paragraph where Gogol himself says, like, “Wow, that was a weird story. It’s crazy how the nose just reattached, and it’s so bizarre that I should find myself writing about it.” And Saunders says the reader gets like this hit of relief where you’re like, “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been thinking the whole way. Thank you for acknowledging it. Thank you for coming across the table and meeting me halfway on this.” And to me, I’m like, no, this is my beef with metafiction again. It’s like, you don’t get to do bad writing and then admit so in the text and then absolve yourself of responsibility for doing bad writing. Like, if anything, I find that even more annoying. It’s like, it shouldn’t be like a get-out-of-jail-free card that you acknowledge the flaws in the piece directly to the reader and then expect to get applauded for that.
I don’t want to bang on about it, but I think the story had two of my least favorite — what I think of as writing sins, which is the lack of internal coherency and then the annoying metafiction razzle-dazzle directly to the reader to justify why the author made some crappy decisions or something. But again, like, I bet you this would have been in 1830s — it probably would have been extremely innovative, perhaps. It could be really fascinating from a historical perspective.
Cam: Yeah, I was just going to say that. Yeah, both the absurdism and the metafictional breaking of the fourth wall, my guess is that’s gotta have some precedence before that. Gogol himself seems to be a quirky sort of dude. Did you read much of his biography, Benny?
Benny: No, not much. I did read he had a huge nose himself. That’s it.
Cam: Oh yeah, okay. Well, there’s one reading, which is funny — you’re probably insecure about it.
Rich: Yeah, possibly insecure, but apparently he made self-deprecating jokes about it constantly in letters to other writers and friends and stuff. And so maybe it’s no surprise that he chose that part of the anatomy to slice off, I don’t know.
Cam: Yeah, the nostril was on his mind for sure.
Benny: Yeah, yeah. Most self-deprecation comes from somewhere.
Cam: Yeah, well, it might be that simple, right? Should we talk about Kovalev a bit? Yeah, just fill in some of the details here. Looks like Voldemort.
The Table of Ranks
Benny: So Kovalev is a collegiate assessor. Technically that’s his rank in Russian society, but he prefers to be addressed as Major. So he’s very self-conscious about trying to correct everyone, tell them — he introduces himself as Major, gets people to call him Major. And my understanding is that while not technically correct, the role of Major was like the military equivalent of collegiate assessor, which was like a governmental designation. And this obsession over rank was sort of well-deserved because — I think in like 1722 or something, Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks to Russian society. The idea is somewhat of a modern one, surprisingly, and it’s to have merit-based admission into the aristocracy. So you had like 14 ranks in Russian society, and there was like literally just a list of names of everyone who occupied these ranks. And people became obsessed with trying to raise their rank in society. And once you got to certain ranks, like eight bestowed something on you, getting to five bestowed something on you. And it was a way to open access to the aristocracy and take it away, or at least make it so that it wasn’t purely accessible by your parents, right? So it wasn’t just purely a hereditary title. And so, yeah, it had some good thoughts behind it. But what ended up happening is just, as you can imagine, it was a huge bureaucratic bloat, basically. And this is where a lot of the satire around the bureaucracy in 17th and 18th century Russia comes from. It was like all these administrators hired to deal with the ranking of everyone in society.
Rich: I’m just wondering if making things legible like that makes you more obsessed or less obsessed with status. I mean, this story implies maybe that you become more obsessed with it.
Cam: Him talking about his position as like Major and stuff — it kind of reminded me of like Gareth off The Office. Sort of saying, like, “Assistant Regional Manager,” and they’re like, “No, no, Assistant to the Regional Manager.” Just like obsessed over this title that is kind of fake. I’m not sure if I was misreading that or not, but it seemed a little bit like that.
Benny: Yeah. He was insecure around his role in society.
Cam: But then the nose as well — when he sees the nose as a person, like the nose outranks him, right? It’s kind of —
Benny: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, what the hell? Like, even my nose has hit rank nine. Waiting for five years.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. So what’s it called, so the Table of Ranks system? I read some of that. Putin might have even —
Benny: Yeah, apparently he sort of reinstituted it in some ways, probably not the exact same, but he reinstituted it in some ways. But yeah, it lasted a long time, and I think it really was pretty formational for the entire sort of czarist era of Russian politics, and also sort of consolidated the czar’s power in some sense, because he was like rank number one, and then you had all these people fighting to be elevated to positions like directly beneath him. And you know, those kind of positions were all swearing loyalty to him and stuff. And so it simultaneously promoted, quote-unquote, this sort of merit-based access to the aristocracy, but also sort of solidified his hold on power in some way — not that maybe he needed that, but yeah, it’s pretty interesting, like, historical episode.
Cam: So we need to reread our Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Yeah, with that in mind, like, this made me much more aware of the role that social status and like legible social status, as you said, played in Russian society. And it would be interesting to now reread some of those other Russian authors with that in mind.
Benny: But yeah, just to conclude this, I guess, like, the most obvious reading of this, I think, is basically just poking fun at people’s obsession with rank at that time, right? So you have this guy who wakes up without a nose, and he’s mostly concerned about how he looks with no nose and the fact that now he’s not going to be able to like hit on girls or partake in his usual activities, go to the right dinner parties. You know, he never says a word about actually like smell or any sort of functionality being lost of not having a nose, right? It’s all about social appearances. And then he absolutely panics when, as Cam said, you know, he sees that the nose now outranks him, has like built his own life somehow. Very quickly, in this half a morning that he’s had, as his own agent in the world. And then, you know, has these run-ins with the police and the newspaper where he’s trying to take an ad out for people to look for his nose, and then, you know, I think the interaction with the advertisement bureau at the newspaper agency is supposed to be about, like, the absurdity around bureaucracy and all these rules and stuff. So I think that’s, yeah, sort of the most straightforward reading of this story. But then you have to ask certain questions like, why would you even have part one and why would you have part three? Like, why not just have part two where this guy wakes up without a nose? Like, what was the point of having the barber find the nose in his loaf? What was the, you know, breaking the fourth wall with the author at the end, talking to the audience? Like, I’m not sure what those parts were about. So yeah, remains to be addressed.
Gogol’s nose
Cam: I’m not sure if you’re here, Rich. So Gogol was — oh, Gogol, Gogol was super insecure about it. He had a big-ass nose. And I kind of like that now. You know, you can then extrapolate to any of your insecurities. And there’s certain probably male insecurities, uh, certain other body parts perhaps. I actually read that some people thought this was like a stand-in for, like, a sort of fraudulent phallic symbol, which feels like a bit of a jump. But I imagine the point still holds. Like, if you’re insecure around that and then suddenly, like, you kind of think that’s always holding you back — like his nose is what’s stopping him with the girls — then you suddenly see if it’s outranking you, and you’re like, “Okay, it’s maybe me, or at least it’s my attitude.”
Rich: But the nose in the story is not like a grotesque nose or anything, right? It’s a perfectly normal nose, but it’s got a pimple on it.
Benny: Yeah, no, they don’t say it’s abnormally big or anything, except for when it’s gallivanting around town.
Rich: Yeah, yeah. I’m just imagining when it’s back on his head now, and he’s like, “I was back,” and he was, oh yeah, like, it’s almost worse. You know, it reminds me of — there’s an Adrian Brody cutscene on Family Guy where they’re like making fun of his enormous nose, and then he was still super mad about it years later and wouldn’t talk to Seth Rogen or something.
Cam: Seth is something else, isn’t it?
Rich: Seth MacFarlane, I think.
Cam: MacFarlane, yeah. The petty squabbling over rank sounds silly, and I think Gogol’s trying to make it sound silly, but could have been quite a big innovation. This is prior to the freeing of the serfs. Wait, no, it’s — oh yeah, it is. Yeah. So there’s like serfs and there’s landowners and aristocrats. There’s no social mobility whatsoever. I mean, I don’t know anything about the historical context of how this worked out, but it seems like it could be a step forward, even if it’s kind of — has its own failings and ends up being more about who’s more of a brown-noser or who is better at politics than who is better at their job. But at least it’s like one step towards something like meritocracy. It’s interesting that, like, even at the time it was presumably considered kind of farcical or at least like good fodder for satire at the extremes.
Benny: Yeah.
Rich: And we’re like 50 to 100 years into it, right, by the time of the story?
Benny: Yeah, if we take this to be written at the actual time he was writing.
Rich: Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys have any more background on how that worked out? Like, did it go well for a while and then create its own sort of local attractor points that were bad in other ways, or was it kind of successful? Was it completely stupid?
Benny: The modern take was that it was like semi-successful with some negative consequences, but it stuck around for a long time, right? So it stuck around until the Bolsheviks had the revolution in 1917. So like almost for 200 years, different leaders changed it in various ways. One that stuck out to me was like Catherine — uh, Catherine the First, I guess — you know, she needed an economist to talk to her about incentives, because this is horrible, but she didn’t like all the squabbling over who should get promoted and stuff. So she just implemented this rule that said, if you’ve been in the same position for seven years, then you automatically get promoted, which is a fucking disaster now, because now it’s not merit-based at all. Now it’s really filled with just like a bunch of bureaucrats and brown-nosers who are just like spending as much time there, just trying to not get fired, so they get an automatic promotion after seven years. So, you know, different leaders put their own spin on it in various ways, I think.
Rich: I imagine even before that, when it was merit-based, there’s still like a kind of James C. Scott, you know, Seeing Like a State criticism of this all — like trying to make all of this legible from a central plan kind of sense that it’s just impossible, and you get this bureaucratic bloat. But also just you’re going to be making the wrong calls as well. I imagine that’s always relative to what, right? Like, exactly.
Benny: Yeah, no, I imagine it did modernize. ChatGPT was saying yeah, at the start, it was this kind of revolutionary tool for modernizing, but eventually, because of this kind of, you know, bureaucracy mainly — but like, yeah, prior to that, right, the only way to have your class elevated in society would have just been to be born into it, so there’s like zero social mobility. So as Rich said, like, you know, it’s at least like a step towards doing that. But yeah, from a modern perspective, you can imagine that it was just a number.
Cam: Twenty that makes it less legible, right? I mean, reminds me of that, um, Black Mirror episode a little bit. Well, actually, I think also called The Nose.
Rich: Wait, oh no, hold on, what?
Cam: Um, no, she didn’t lose her nose, but where everything is almost like a social media ranking system in society.
Rich: Oh, the redhead in it, and they’re just obsessed, and as soon as you lose points you’re kind of fucked.
Benny: Oh, is that the one where everyone’s like rating each other constantly?
Rich: Yeah, yeah, with little devices.
Benny: Is it called The Nose?
Rich: Well, I’ll check.
Benny: Yeah, I couldn’t tell if you were serious. You’re making that up.
Cam: Nosedive. So no, it’s called Nosedive, but you know, maybe — oh, it’s got, what’s her name, big booty Jurassic Park.
Rich: Oh yeah, Bryce Dallas Howard.
Cam: Yeah, that’s one of the few Black Mirror episodes I’ve seen.
Rich: Yeah, she loses her ass in that episode.
Benny: That’s not a comedy, that’s a tragedy.
Cam: Is there anything else about this story about — Richard’s favorite story?
Rich: I wish I’d actually read the George Saunders bit instead of half-heartedly trying to remember it. He said, “Why don’t we just dismiss The Nose as bad writing?” after explaining all the reasons why it is kind of bad writing. And he said, well, one reason is we just don’t. This elaborate joke story that seems to make a certain logical sense but doesn’t is done so well that it tricks our reading mind into assuming coherence in the same way that the eye perceiving a series of snapshots sells it to us as continuous motion. So that’s where I came apart. I was like, no, it wasn’t done so well that it tricked me. I was like very aware of all the random-ass jumps throughout, and like constant — yeah, accumulation of questions building up, like, you know, yeah, like a hundred questions that are building up in your mind, none of which get resolved. But anyway, I guess that for some reason didn’t quite land.
Cam: Do you like, what’s the guy’s name, Lanthimos, or Lengthimos, his films, like, he does The Lobster and stuff, um, and like The Favourite?
Rich: I haven’t seen many of them. I’ve seen The Lobster. I have a feeling that he’s overrated, but I haven’t seen Poor Things. What was the other recent one?
Cam: Yeah, no, I don’t have any opinion.
Rich: Kinds of Kindness, but I think that has one or two surreal elements, and then it’s kind of consistent.
Cam: Okay, well, we should say for the listener, next time we’re doing The Odyssey. Come join us for that. The Nose was like a surprise in between us, though, but we’ve really been working on The Odyssey.
Rich: We’re also reading Emily Wilson’s translation. Yeah, but we’ll probably read some others. That’ll be the text we’re —
Listener feedback
Cam: Yeah. Should I read out a bit of listener mail?
Rich: Sure. Do we have some?
Cam: Yeah, we got a couple nice messages. Yeah, we asked you listeners, “Do you want more Do You Even Lit?” Did I read Maxim’s message yet?
Rich: No, I think we just talked about Rio’s.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, right. So Maxim or Daniel said, “Keep up the pod, please don’t stop. Started getting more and more into literature concurrently with the podcast starting up, and it’s been awesome seeing it come along. I could be wrong, but it seems like there aren’t many people doing what you’re doing in the space of stem cells slash rat brains, bringing your views to literary criticism and classics.”
Rich: Sounds like — yeah, one of us, one of us.
Cam: “The only tiny thing that maybe could be better is you guys talking over each other and getting Cam and Rich delineated. The only way I can tell the difference right now is listening for whose mic is worse.”
Rich: Well, sorry, you won’t even be able to tell that now, because it took one year for us to get like just passable audio quality.
Cam: I know.
Rich: It’s so bad. But we’re professionals this year. 2025 is the year we go professional. We start all our meetings on time. We have perfect segues and intros, and we always call each other by our names.
Cam: Yeah, anyway, that’s a really nice message. So thank you for that, Daniel slash Maxim.
Rich: It’s kind of perfect. It sounds like he just got into the literature, right? So he’s like this, you know, reads all this nonfiction rationalist stuff.
Cam: Yeah, that’s great.
Rich: And he stumbled across this podcast, and it’s like the exact journey we’re doing.
Cam: There you go. Yeah, I’d love to pick up fellow travelers and people who are really experienced and have smart things to say and can help us. That would be cool as well. There’s more pressure on what we pick now. Have to pick a good book.
Rich: There’s a couple more here, but I’ll read them out another time. But please write in to us, doyouevenlit at gmail dot com, D-O-U-E-V-E-N-L-I-T, and tell us what you thought about The Nose by Gogol and get started reading The Odyssey because it is an epic and I think it’s going to be heaps of fun. Anything more to say, or do you guys want to say bye?
Benny: If I was listening to us, I would start a drinking game trying to guess who liked it and who didn’t, and I’m pretty sure I’d have Rich nailed. I think I’ve got a perfect mental model of what Rich likes and what he doesn’t like.
Cam: You know his taste now. Too legible.
Rich: No, you guys nailed it, honest. I was thinking about Beckett when I was reading this.
Cam: Cool. All right, The Odyssey.
Benny: See you then.
Rich: See ya.
