The Nose and Other Stories

A government official wakes up to find his nose has left his face and is walking around St. Petersburg with a higher civil service rank than he has. The nose refuses to acknowledge him in public. Gogol uses this absurdist premise to expose the specific absurdity of Russian bureaucratic society — a world where rank and the performance of status matter more than reality, where the social machinery is so complete that a nose can outrank its former face without anyone finding this fundamentally unusual. Was made uncomfortable by the tsarist censors, who found the satire accurate enough to be dangerous. The most important Russian satirist and the writer who showed Kafka exactly how to use the impossible premise as a diagnostic tool for the completely real. The missing link between Cervantes and Kafka on the absurdist shelf.