Gogol’s “The Nose”: Between Social Satire, Linguistic Indecency, and Religious Blasphemy
Join the Slavic Colloquium for a talk by Igor Pilshchikov (University of California, Los Angeles).
Gogol’s “The Nose”: Between Social Satire, Linguistic Indecency, and Religious Blasphemy
This analysis of Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist tale, “The Nose” (1835), offers an integral interpretation of one of Gogol’s most influential works and elaborates on the approaches to Gogol’s language, imagery and plot developed earlier by the Russian Formalists and Tartu-Moscow semioticians, including but not limited to Lotmanian and Toporovian semiotics of sacral and profane space. The aim of the analysis is to understand what the enigmatic but telling details of the story reveal about Gogol’s religious and psychological crisis of the mid-1830s and to demonstrate how he aggregated indecent Shandyism, social satire and religious blasphemy into a single quasi-oneiric narrative. The concluding section of the talk is devoted to the symbolism of dates in “The Nose.”
Igor Pilshchikov (PhD, Dr hab.) is professor of Russian literature at the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages & Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and research professor of cultural semiotics and Russian literature at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University (Estonia). He is the author of two book on the Russian “Golden Age” poets (Batiushkov and Pushkin) and has published more than 200 journal articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century Russian literature, comparative literature, literary theory, verse studies and digital humanities. He is founding academic editor of the Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature & Folklore (FEB-web.ru), the information system CPCL: Comparative Poetics and Comparative Literature (CPCL.feb-web.ru) and the Russian Virtual Library (RVB.ru), and editor of the journals Studia Metrica et Poetica (University of Tartu Press) and Pushkin Review (Slavica Publishers).
Contact: dlclevents [at] stanford.edu (dlclevents[at]stanford[dot]edu) and srpage [at] stanford.edu (srpage[at]stanford[dot]edu)