Gogol’s Strangest Sentences: The Nose, The Overcoat and Dead Souls

The best Gogol quotes are deadpan reports of the impossible. A barber finds a nose in his breakfast loaf, the nose turns up in a state-councillor’s uniform, and the narrator closes by grumbling that nobody should write stories like this. Below are fourteen of Gogol’s strangest sentences from “The Nose”, “The Overcoat” and Dead Souls, with one bonus from “Memoirs of a Madman”, each with the story or chapter it comes from.

A note on the English. The stories are quoted from Claud Field’s translation, The Mantle and Other Stories, published by Frederick A. Stokes in New York and T. Werner Laurie in London, with an introduction by Prosper Mérimée. Field calls “The Overcoat” “The Mantle”. Dead Souls is quoted from D. J. Hogarth’s translation. Both are public domain, and Field’s spellings of the names are kept.

Gogol quotes from The Nose

1. Breakfast

He put in his finger, and drew out—a nose!

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Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”, section I, trans. Claud Field

Ivan Jakovlevitch the barber has asked for fresh bread with onions instead of coffee. He cuts the loaf in two and finds something whitish stuck in it. The story is dated with mock precision, On the 25th March, 18–, a very strange occurrence took place in St Petersburg. The dash is the whole joke: a precise date, and then the year withheld.

2. The barber’s logic

in all probability this is a quite extraordinary occurrence, for a loaf is something baked and a nose is something different.

Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”, section I

His wife is screaming that he has cut off a customer’s nose. He recognises it as the nose of Kovaloff, whom he shaves every Sunday and Wednesday, and this is the best reasoning he can manage. It is perfectly true and explains nothing.

3. A different department

There you are wrong, respected sir; I am myself. Besides, there can be no close relations between us. To judge by the buttons of your uniform, you must be in quite a different department to mine.

Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”, section II

Kovaloff has followed his own nose into the Grand Bazar, where it is shopping in a gold-embroidered uniform and a plumed hat that marks the rank of state-councillor. He addresses it with stammering deference. The nose snubs him on grounds of rank. Petersburg’s obsession with grade is so complete that a body part can pull rank on its owner.

4. The nose’s passport

It has been arrested just as it was getting into a carriage for Riga. Its passport had been made out some time ago in the name of an official

Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”, section II

A police officer brings the nose home wrapped in paper and explains that he only saw it was a nose once he put his glasses on. The detail that it carried papers in an official’s name, made out long in advance, implies the escape was planned. Then the nose will not stick back on, and the doctor suggests preserving it in spirits and selling it.

5. The narrator objects

But the most incomprehensible thing of all is, how authors can choose such subjects for their stories. That really surpasses my understanding. In the first place, no advantage results from it for the country; and in the second place, no harm results either.

Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”, section IV

The nose is back on Kovaloff’s face on 7th April, with no explanation, and the narrator turns critic of his own tale. He complains that it is improbable, then useless, then admits such cases do occur, rarely. The joke is aimed at the reader’s demand for a point.

Gogol quotes from The Overcoat

6. Born a titular councillor

It was baptised, although it wept and cried and made all kinds of grimaces, as though it had a presentiment that it would one day be a titular councillor.

Nikolai Gogol, “The Mantle” (“The Overcoat”), trans. Claud Field

Akaki Akakievitch’s mother has rejected names from the church calendar, among them Mokuja, Sossuja and Khozdazat, and settles on his father’s name as plainly fate. The baby cries at his christening because he can foresee his civil-service grade. Gogol adds that colleagues came to believe Akaki had come into the world just as he was, with his bald forehead and official uniform.

7. A man of prepositions

We must here remark that the modest titular councillor was in the habit of expressing his thoughts only by prepositions, adverbs, or particles, which never yielded a distinct meaning.

Nikolai Gogol, “The Mantle” (“The Overcoat”)

Akaki has climbed to the tailor Petrovitch’s attic to ask for a repair, and can only say I come just–merely–in order–I want–. The diagnosis is funny and sad at once. Akaki lives for copying other people’s words and has none of his own. When he is once given a real report to draft, he begs to be given something to copy again.

8. Married to a coat

From that time it seemed as though his nature had completed itself; as though he had married and possessed a companion on his life journey. This companion was the thought of his new cloak, properly wadded and lined.

Nikolai Gogol, “The Mantle” (“The Overcoat”)

Petrovitch has refused to patch the old cloak, so Akaki saves for a new one by giving up tea in the evening and going to bed without supper. The love story of his life is with an idea of outerwear. It lasts a single day: the cloak is stolen on his way home from the party where his colleagues admired it.

9. The ghost who takes coats

he was searching for a stolen cloak, and stripped all passers-by of their cloaks without any regard for rank or title. It mattered not whether they were lined with wadding, mink, cat, otter, bear, or beaverskin

Nikolai Gogol, “The Mantle” (“The Overcoat”)

After Akaki dies of a fever, Petersburg hears of a ghost near the Katinka Bridge. The list of furs is the comedy, and so is the phrase about rank: the clerk whom every official ignored becomes, after death, the one force in the city that treats them all as equals. The sightings stop, more or less, once he has taken the cloak of the important personage who shouted him out of his office.

Gogol quotes from Dead Souls

10. A hero who is not anything

a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young.

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, Part I, chapter I, trans. D. J. Hogarth

Chichikov arrives in a provincial town and is introduced entirely by negatives. The only comment on his arrival is two peasants debating whether his carriage would reach Moscow, but not Kazan. Gogol’s hero buys dead serfs on paper, and he is introduced as a man with no qualities to notice.

11. The trouble is that they are dead

Oh, no, indeed! Why should they be worth keeping? I am sure they are not so. The only thing which troubles me is the fact that they are DEAD.

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, Part I, chapter III

Madam Korobotchka, the widow of a Collegiate Secretary, is being asked to sell the dead serfs she still pays tax on. She has sold living ones without a qualm, and she worries that she is being cheated on the price of corpses. Chichikov sweats through the bargaining while she keeps trying to sell him honey and hemp instead.

12. Made with a hatchet

One cut with a hatchet, and there results a nose; another such cut with a hatchet, and there materialises a pair of lips; two thrusts with a drill, and there issues a pair of eyes.

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, Part I, chapter V

This is how nature made Sobakevitch, a landowner who exactly resembled a moderate-sized bear, down to a frockcoat the colour of a bear’s hide and a habit of treading on his guest’s toes. Gogol writes him as carpentry.

13. Plushkin’s desk

a lemon dried and shrunken to the dimensions of a hazelnut, the broken arm of a chair, a tumbler containing the dregs of some liquid and three flies (the whole covered over with a sheet of notepaper), a pile of rags, two ink-encrusted pens, and a yellow toothpick with which the master of the house had picked his teeth (apparently) at least before the coming of the French to Moscow.

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, Part I, chapter VI

The inventory of a miser’s room ends with a toothpick dated by the French arrival in Moscow. Chichikov mistakes Plushkin himself for the housekeeper until the old man says he is the master. The flies kept under notepaper, as if they might be wanted later, are the most Gogolian detail in the book.

A bonus from Memoirs of a Madman

14. The moon is repaired in Hamburg

The moon is generally repaired in Hamburg, and very imperfectly. It is done by a lame cooper, an obvious blockhead who has no idea how to do it.

Nikolai Gogol, “Memoirs of a Madman”, entry “Madrid, February 30th”, trans. Claud Field

Poprishchin, another titular councillor, has decided he is the king of Spain. He is driven to a building full of men with shorn heads, which he takes for Madrid, and the reader recognises as an asylum. The diary dates have collapsed (one entry is headed The year 2000: April 43rd), and he goes on to explain that only noses live on the moon. Even in madness, Gogol comes back to noses.

Quick reference: Gogol quotes by work

Gogol’s clerks are the ancestors of Kafka’s: compare Akaki with Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s most unsettling lines. For more sentences of this kind across the canon, see the strangest sentences in classic literature and the strangest lines in Moby-Dick.

John Cournos’s introduction to the Hogarth translation says Dead Souls was first published in 1842, and that Gogol burned the manuscript of the second part, of which only fragments survive. He also quotes a line he credits to another Russian writer, about the story Field called “The Mantle”: We have all issued out of Gogol’s Cloak.

Sources

• Nikolai Gogol, The Mantle and Other Stories, trans. Claud Field, introduction by Prosper Mérimée (Project Gutenberg #36238), plain text at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/36238/pg36238.txt; “The Mantle”, “The Nose”, “Memoirs of a Madman”
• Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. D. J. Hogarth, introduction by John Cournos (Project Gutenberg #1081), plain text at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1081/pg1081.txt