The Nose and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol translated by Susanne Fusso

 The master of nonsense, with solid touches of gothic and a personal fixation, notorious in Russians, for the devil and its interactions with people: this one and much more is Nikolai Gogol, and this one is a book published by Columbia University Press celebrating his short stories.

The Nose and Other

Stories by Nikolai Gogol translated by Susanne Fusso is wonderfully complete. We find the early stories written by the writer, and most of them of the latest part of his existence. I firstly read Gogol when I was 17 and I found him impressive: Gogol is geniality, obscurity, irony, a feat psychologist and a visionary.

When Columbia published this book I immediately asked of reading it.

Gogol is an artist in the creation of nonsense stories but also, as for example in the firs tale The Lost Letter, in instilling in the main protagonist a sensation of freedom and forgetting mixed to the super-natural represented by demoniac presences and sorcery. 

You'll read the tale: there is this man who wanted to write to the empress, but.... he didn't want to send this letter; he decided that he would have personally given the letter to the empress. So he leaves his house and family for the long trip. It happens always that during a trip, it's a metaphor of the existence, we get lost for later re-discovering ourselves.

And it is the same thing that happens to the Cossak. He wanted to give a letter personally written to the empress, but then he meets along his way some friends and with them he has a lot of fun, forgetting the reason why he had abandoned his house for other places. Doing that, one of these friends will confess him that he is the devil...The protagonist will lose the precious letter and will ask to the owner of the tavern where he had drunk with these companions some help...Once rescued what lost, he will goes straight to the point. Like losing and re-finding the compass of the existence, this one is a little powerful tale, involving the other world and in the specific the hell and the powerful existence of every man. 

It's a tale, this one that will let you think a lot.

The Portrait is another short tale written two times by Gogol the first one in 1835, the second in 1842; in this case a painter notices a portrait in a store and buys it. Just...The character portrayed interacts with him!

I loved tremendoudly Rome. There is this prince, who was born in Italy. He didn't know a lot of the rest of the world but then his father sent him abroad for studying and discovering the world. A new reality and endless possibilities are available for the prince, who will fall in love  for Paris for several years. Then Paris became tiring to him and he fell melancholy for Italy. At the same time his father dies...

Italians are portrayed, Gogol lived a lot of time in Rome, perfectly!

People who don't want to fight, as all the time their french cousins do, but that love to enjoy the pleasures of the existence.

Gogole writes: "They know how to separate religion from its hypocritcal practitioners and they haven't been infected by the cold idea of unbelief. ...They are cheerful and endure everything, and only in novels and stories do they cut people's throat in the streets." Another consideration I found interesting was this one: "It was as if European Enlightment had intentionally not touched these people and instilled its cold process of improvement in its breast."

A magnificent, impressive description of Rome follows: "Here there was a luminous, solemn serenity."

Return, (like also in Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano) the thematic of the forgetting when in Rome. Admiring Rome is possible to forget ourselves and the rest of the world close to us, reaching an extreme and beautiful peace.

The Nose is for sure the most hilarious story of this book! So, one day a man finds a nose somewhere...He is scared to death. This nose must be of someone else. It is perfect, absolutely uncut and the fact that he fell down from a face, or maybe just...run away from a face represents obviously reason of curiosity. Anyway, once the nose is set free, somewhere else there is the desperate owner of the nose, who, once awoken, discovered the tremendous news: oh Gosh! The nose disappeared, as for magic and at its place there was...Nothing. Panic, panic! This man has many connections, she loves to spend time with several women. How can they appreciate a noseless man?

Plus: his work: how could it be possible to work in that state? 

The Nose at the same time starts to do the same work of his own! Having fun, visiting churches and so on. The nose-owner desperate and covering his face for not let show the non-existence of the nose, once will ask help also at the reporter of a newsroom for an ad: he was searching for his nose! causing the hilarity and skepticism of the people who didn't want to put this ad in the paper.

There is a good end for this adorable masterpiece!

Other short stories are the Overcoat,  The Carriage, Diary of a Madman, Nevsky Avenue and Viy.

Beautiful readings !

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori