In March,
1837, Gogol moved on to Rome and immediately fell in love with the place. Rome
remained with him an obsession for many years. Here is an excerpt from a letter
linking Gogol’s nose motif in his writings and life to the beloved city:
“What
a spring! Lord God, what a spring! . . . . What air! Inhale deeply through your
nose and you feel as if no less than seven hundred angels had come flying up
your nasal nostrils. An amazing spring it is! I can’t get enough of admiring
it. All of Rome is strewn these days with roses . . . . Believe me that
frequently I feel the frenzied desire to turn into nothing but a nose, so that
there would be nothing more of me—no eyes, no hands, no feet—just one gigantic
nose, with nostrils as big as good-sized buckets, so that I could draw into my
insides the maximum volume of aromas and of spring”
(letter to Marya Balabina,
April, 1838, with a heading that reads, “Rome. The month of April. Year 2588th
since the founding of the city”).
Note the
pleonasm in the phrase “nasal nostrils (носовые ноздри),” as if to suggest that there were other bodily nostrils
in addition to the nasal ones. Such “errors” are typical of Gogol’s style,
which, even in his best fiction, often is weirdly ragged, nonstandard. A famous
example of another such pleonasm is a passage describing “Russian mouzhiks” at the beginning of Dead Souls, as if there were mouzhiks (Russian peasants) in countries
other than Russia.
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