Summary
"The Nose" opens on the 25th of March in St. Petersburg, Russia. That morning, a barber named Ivan Yakovlevitch, who lives on the Voznesensky Prospekt, wakes up early. He smells the fresh bread that his wife, Prascovia Osipovna, is pulling out from the oven. He tells his wife that instead of coffee that morning he would like fresh bread and onions. His wife gives him a fresh-baked roll, and thinks to herself that it is better this way as she will have all the coffee to herself.
The barber sits down at the table, puts on a shirt for the sake of propriety, and prepares his breakfast of bread and onion. But when he cuts open the roll, he discovers to his horror that a nose lies inside. Even worse, he recognizes the nose. His wife goes into a wrath upon noticing the nose, calling him names and threatening to report him to the police for pulling off someone's nose. As she berates him, Ivan Yakovlevitch realizes it is the nose of his customer the Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, who he shaves every Wednesday and Sunday.
He implores his wife to stop yelling, telling her that he will wrap up the nose and leave it in the corner and eventually dispose of it. But she flies into a further rage at this plan, and orders him to dispose of it immediately.
Ivan Yakovlevitch has no idea how he has come into possession of the nose. He isn't even sure whether he came home drunk last night or not. He starts to get nervous at the thought of the police coming after him, their uniform flashing before his eyes. So he hurries out of the house with the nose wrapped in a rag in the hopes of disposing of it as soon as possible. But each time he tries to dispose of the nose, he is thwarted by suddenly running into a friend and being forced to chat. Once, he succeeds in "dropping" it, but a constable sees and shouts over at him to pick up what he's lost.
At last, Ivan Yakovlevitch turns to the Isaakievsky Bridge, with the plan of dropping the nose over the Neva River.
At this point the narrator asserts himself in the first person, apologizing for not providing more details about the protagonist earlier. He goes on to describe the barber as a terribly unkept man and a drunkard. According to his customer, the Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, his hands also smell. But he is a worthy citizen nonetheless.
The narrator then returns to the plot and describes how the barber casts the nose into the river from the bridge, attempting to do it as inconspicuously as possible. He is very pleased to be rid of the nose, until he notices a very smart-looking constable beckoning to him from the end of the bridge. The barber approaches and the constable asks him what he was doing on the bridge. Ivan Yakovlevitch tries to make excuses, and then offers him a free shave every week, but the constable refuses and presses him to answer.
At that point, the narrator pauses the action so as to tell another part of the story.
Analysis
The opening scene of "The Nose" reflects Gogol's surreal and grotesque writing style common to his works of the time. The barber's perfectly normal morning is interrupted by a fantastical twist: a nose appears in his breakfast. If that is not strange enough, the fact that the barber immediately recognizes the nose as belonging to his customer, Major Kovalev, is highly improbable.
Yet this phenomenon goes unquestioned, thus implying the existence of an alternative logic within the story. The rest of the story unfolds based on the foundation of this absurdist logic.
The second scene unfolds in the public space, quickly developing the theme of social relations and public life that will figure so prominently in the entirety of the text. As Ivan Yakovlevitch traverses the streets of St. Petersburg, the oppressive presence of the public foils the barber's attempts to rid himself of the nose. Acquaintances and constables alike helpfully interject whenever he is about to lose the incriminating object, suggesting a crowded public sphere that weighs heavily on private desires.
This first section also introduces the theme of fear, an emotional reaction that weighs heavily on both Ivan Yakovlevitch and, in the next section, Major Kovalev. In the first scene, the barber is afraid of his wife's anger, and it motivates him to get out onto the street and set off the strange chain of events in the story that results in Major Kovalev's nose on the loose. That fear is mixed with a fear of the police, represented by the vivid imagery of a sword and red uniform.
This fear accompanies the barber into the street, onto the bridge, and heightens in a moment of suspense as the narrator pauses the action.
