The Nose
Author: Nikolai Gogol
Read “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol in Russian, English, French and Japanese in Bibliott on your phone and tablet.
Languages: RU, English, French, Japanese
Genre: Fantasy, Satire, Short story
Free to read
A Petersburg barber finds a stranger's nose baked into his breakfast bread, while Collegiate Assessor Kovaloff, waking up without a nose, chases his own nose through the capital as it parades about in the uniform of a state councillor.
Characters
- Kovaloff — collegiate assessor who styles himself Major: A vain official who wakes to find his nose gone and dashes about the capital to save his standing and reputation.
- the Nose — Kovaloff's runaway nose: The Major's nose, going about town in the uniform of a state councillor and passing itself off as a person of higher rank.
- Ivan Jakovlevitch — barber: A tippling barber who finds Kovaloff's nose in his fresh bread and tries in terror to get rid of it.
- Prasskovna Ossipovna — Ivan Jakovlevitch's wife: The barber's scolding wife, who drives her husband and the discovered nose out of the house.
- Podtotchina — a staff-officer's wife: The mother of a marriageable daughter, whom Kovaloff suspects of bewitching him for refusing to marry the girl.
- the doctor — Kovaloff's neighbour in the house: He examines the empty place on the face and advises leaving matters as they are.
- the police inspector — a police official: He frightens the barber on the bridge and later brings Kovaloff the intercepted nose himself.