A Long-Range Weapon, or All Around The Nose

;Part I. To Whom Shostakovich Showed "The Nose"
;by Olga Skvirskaya
;Foreword
;In our day, the fact that Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich stood in opposition to the Soviet regime is beyond doubt. But back then, in the late 1980s, when Sasha was writing his thesis on Shostakovich’s work, such an idea wouldn't have crossed anyone's mind. He was the Secretary of the Union of Composers, the author of the Leningrad Symphony, and the composer of "Rise Up, You Curly-Haired One!" Every piece he wrote seemed to be about war, the revolution, or Lenin. And his speeches at the plenums were pure party-line propaganda.
;And yet, we were given a chance to suspect that Shostakovich had a "fig in his pocket"—a hidden middle finger to the authorities.
;It is difficult to explain to a young person of the third millennium what "Perestroika" actually felt like. Well, imagine it like this: you walk into a grocery store on December 31, 1991, and buy a kilogram of sour cream for 30 kopecks. The next day, January 1, 1992, that exact same sour cream costs 15 rubles. That was "economic shock therapy." I don’t even want to remember how we survived.
;However, this grimace of the Perestroika market had an upside: in the bookstore near the conservatory, sheet music from the old days was gathering dust at the old prices. How could a musicologist pass up a beautifully published vocal score of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose for a few miserable kopecks? You couldn't walk past it! Though back then, I would have preferred something more popular than an obscure opera based on a neutral, classical plot.
;My husband, Sasha, on the other hand, rushed to flip through the thick volume the moment he got back to the dorm. And the further he read, the more puzzled he became. By the time he reached the fourth act, he confidently uttered the word "sedition" and pointed to a page in the score.
;During a general pause, a certain Middle Eastern character named Khozrev-Mirza says, with a thick Caucasian accent: "I don't understand an-nything... The Nose is taking a stroll in the Summer Garden?" So what?
;"Here's what: Shostakovich is showing The Nose to a certain Eastern despot! Or something even wilder... The plot is entirely Freudian!"
;So much for a harmless classic. Sasha started digging. The deeper he dug, the more convinced we became that Shostakovich was "our guy." The more we listened to his non-programmatic music, the more confidently we discovered musical evidence of the composer’s active protest against Soviet reality—information about which was flooding over us in a torrent thanks to the era of Glasnost.
;The resulting paper was incredibly witty, entirely convincing, and utterly unprovable.
;"We are missing the main thing—Shostakovich’s own opinion. He’s the only person who could shed light on this," we lamented.
;But Dmitry Dmitrievich was long gone.
;Perhaps Arnold Mikhailovich could say something? Conductor Kats had frequently conducted his music; surely he must understand.
;"Is this for the newspaper? Write this down: Shostakovich was a man of firm civic virtue..." Kats dictated in an official, bureaucratic tone.
;The grand specialist on Shostakovich at our conservatory was Osipenko, a lady with the fading traces of past beauty on her face. Rumor had it that long ago, Shostakovich had proposed to her. She turned him down, but from that day forward, she was considered the leading authority on Soviet music. She had even invented a specialized terminology to define the finales of Shostakovich’s symphonies through the lens of socialist realism. She classified certain finales as "procedural" and others as "resultative." She would immediately add a caveat that these rarely existed in their pure form, leading to new sub-classifications: "resultative-procedural," "procedural-resultative," and there were even "resultative-procedural-resultative" ones. By "result," she meant the complete and final victory of socialism... In short, I don’t even want to remember how we survived that exam. Needless to say, Osipenko brought us no closer to unlocking the mystery of Shostakovich.
;Then, suddenly, someone dropped the name of Solomon Volkov. Supposedly, there was this musicologist to whom Shostakovich had told everything, and this man had emigrated to America and smuggled these truthful memoirs to the West... We couldn't even dream of catching a glimpse of them. Back then, the West seemed like a distant planet.
;Defending Sasha’s thesis, even during the Glasnost period, was no easy task.
;I remember he had to choose a perfectly neutral topic for his diploma—something like "Music Education in the Mass Media"—and insert his essay on Shostakovich at the very end as an "illustration." At the defense, the head of the committee, a musicologist from Rostov named Tsuker, said: "I’m reading this, thinking, what nonsense, when suddenly, right in the middle—a absolutely remarkable article on The Nose! And then I understood everything. Good job, young man!"—and gave Sasha the highest mark.
;Many years have passed. In a country where a kilogram of sour cream once cost 15 rubles and the score of The Nose cost 2, musicology can hardly feed you. We had to work any job we could find until fate eventually threw us onto the tropical island of Koh Samui. Going abroad long ago stopped feeling like something otherworldly, and thanks to Facebook, the world has turned into a big village.
;When Solomon Volkov’s name popped up on Facebook, I couldn't believe my eyes. That same mysterious musicologist from the moon?! And the legendary interview with Shostakovich—did it actually exist? Believe it or not, yes! And you can actually read it?! Online?!
;Nowadays, you can do anything. Near tears, Sasha and I read Testimony. Oh, if only we had laid our hands on it thirty-five years ago... But we realized that even back then, we had understood everything perfectly.
;And then we read Julian Barnes's novel The Noise of Time, which was based on Testimony. We had to read it in English because we couldn't find a Russian translation at the time. But what a pure joy it was for us.
;Perhaps our work on The Nose is morally obsolete.
;After all, proving Shostakovich’s dissident nature today is like breaking down an open door. The "defensive" language of our study is the inevitable consequence of the academic musicology that nurtured us; a stylistic stamp of supposedly scientific thinking that is hard to shake off all at once. So be it. What is written is written.
;I really want to thank Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich for being exactly who he was, for the opera The Nose, and for everything else. To the wonderful musicologist Solomon Volkov, for preserving the authentic Shostakovich for posterity. To the American writer Julian Barnes, for doing what no domestic writer has managed to do yet—creating a truthful novel about Shostakovich. And to our Teacher, Vladimir Mikhailovich Kaluzhsky, for teaching us how to think outside the box.
;There was a moment when Sasha and I realized we had acquired the most useless profession for the wild nineties, yet we have never regretted it for a single day. Thanks to Shostakovich.
;Olga Skvirskaya
2016, Koh Samui
;Part II. Not Recommended for Musicologists Under 16
;by Alexander Dudukin
;Gogol falls onto the stage from behind the wings and lies perfectly still...
— Daniil Kharms
;On November 25, 1928, the suite from Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera The Nose premiered in Moscow at the Great Hall of the Conservatory.
On January 18, 1930, the full opera premiered at the Leningrad Maly Opera Theatre.
The vocal score was published in 1929 in Leningrad and in 1974 in Moscow.
The current whereabouts of the original handwritten score remain unknown...
;Why "The Nose"?(1)
;Who cares about the morally obsolete, highly inconsistent misadventures of some random Collegiate Assessor? What could possibly attract a young composer to this textbook satire on an outdated past, an establishment already destroyed to its very foundations?
;Well, there is something here that you simply cannot suffocate or kill: the so-called carnivalesque nature of Gogol’s novella.
"With material like The Nose, one can work much deeper," the Maestro decided.
;Is Gogol's The Nose not a quintessential Menippean satire—distinguished by this genre's characteristic blend of the fantastic and symbolic with raw, slum-dwelling naturalism? It features depictions of "madness," split personalities, dreams, and scandals; scenes of eccentric behavior, inappropriate speeches, violations of etiquette, and "dialogues on the threshold." This genre is so ancient that its roots reach deep into antiquity and the Middle Ages—back to Menippus's Satires, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Boccaccio's Decameron.
;The Nose and the Major are a classic carnivalesque, parodic pair, matched by the stark contrast of "fat and thin."
So, who is parodying whom? Is the Nose Kovalev’s carnival double, or is it the other way around? By detaching itself from the Major's "personality," the Nose took all of his self-respect, leaving its master with an absolute "inferiority complex." It is no coincidence that the Nose "dresses up" in the uniform of a State Councillor—the absolute pinnacle of Major Kovalev's dreams.
;Curiously, all of these wild adventures take place in an historically precise location, right in the heart of Saint Petersburg: on Nevsky Prospekt, in the Summer Garden, inside the Kazan Cathedral, "upon the granite banks of the Neva." Filtered through Gogol’s perception, Petersburg acquired that bizarre quality that would be attributed to it for nearly a century.
;Once, Gogol dressed up as Pushkin and went to visit Pushkin. Pushkin opens the door and says: "Well look at that, Arina Rodionovna, look—I have arrived!"(2)
;"Dressing up"—or masking—is a highly popular carnivalesque device across all times and cultures, and it wasn't bypassed by Gogol himself!
Remember what Nikolai Vasilievich wrote in Nevsky Prospekt:
;...Before him sat Schiller—not that Schiller who wrote William Tell... but the famous Schiller, the tinsmith on Meshchanskaya Street. Next to Schiller stood Hoffmann—not the writer Hoffmann, but a rather good shoemaker from Ofitserskaya Street... Schiller was drunk and sat on a chair, stamping his foot and speaking with great passion...
;From there, it’s just a stone's throw to Bulgakov's Moscow psychiatrist Stravinsky, or to Berlioz—not that lesser-known composer Berlioz, but Misha Berlioz, the chairman of MASSOLIT...
Speaking of composers:
;"What instrument do you think this theme is meant for?" Stravinsky asks (the composer, not the psychiatrist!).
"The violins, of course!"
"Then I shall give it to the trombones!"
;Yes, a stellar example of a composer’s urge to "dress up" the music!
Want more about composers? Here you go:
;Once, Shebalin came to visit Shostakovich and said:
"Tell me, Mitya, which instrument should I assign this theme to: the clarinet or the flute?"
"The clarinet or the flute."
"That’s what I’m asking you: the clarinet or the flute?"
"Either the clarinet, or the flute!"
;(The Maestro himself didn't waste time pondering: to the flute give what is the flute's, and to the clarinet give what is the clarinet's)...
But enough of that! What was that drunk Schiller saying to the drunk Hoffmann while stamping his foot?
;"I don’t want it, I don't need a nose!"
;Well, as for us, we happen to need exactly "The Nose"!
;What kind of idea "occurs" in Shostakovich’s opera of the same name? It’s highly unlikely he would have set a classical plot to music without a hidden agenda!
Shostakovich emphasizes and amplifies every carnivalesque feature of the source material. We are dealing with a Menippean satire in opera form—unfolding strictly by the laws of the genre!
Take "raw slum naturalism," for instance—there is plenty of it to go around!
A pimple on the nose, all sorts of sneezing, macabre images of a pickled nose in a jar, and even a handily provided recipe for the solution: "two spoonfuls of strong vodka and warmed vinegar."
;In this "naturalistic" light, the very first line of the opera is remarkable:
"Your hands, Ivan Yakovlevich, always smell foul!"
;Pushkin spent the summer of 1829 in the countryside. (Back to Pushkin!) He would wake up early in the morning, drink a jug of fresh milk, and run to the river for a swim. Having swum in the river, Pushkin would lie down on the grass and sleep until lunch. After lunch, Pushkin would sleep in a hammock. Whenever he encountered foul-smelling peasants, Pushkin would nod his head to them and pinch his nose (!) with his fingers. And the foul-smelling peasants would tip their caps and say: "It's nothing."
;What is Russia without foul-smelling peasants, and what is a Menippean satire without interpolated genres?
For Shostakovich, it all starts with a "two-in-one"—an inserted song by the "foul-smelling servant" Ivan, utilizing words by Dostoevsky, no less:
"By an invincible force, I am drawn to my sweetheart..." ("What exquisite rhymes!")
;As are the rhymes, so is the stage direction:
“In the anteroom, Ivan lies on the sofa, playing the balalaika, spitting at the ceiling, and singing.”
;Can one truly perform all of these actions simultaneously? They say it is possible (back to Kharms!):
“Anton Mikhailovich spat, said 'oh well', spat again, said 'oh well' again, spat again, said 'oh well' again, and left. And God be with him...”
;So, the slum naturalism is firmly in place.
The musical-carnival masquerade is too.
As if trying on different carnival masks, Shostakovich completely reinterprets his favorite Masters.
The Old Noblewoman with her hangers-on—a nod to Tchaikovsky, is it not?
The Doctor, madly in love with science, and the Barber, consumed by paranoia—are these not echoes of the recently sensational production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck?
;Once, Prokofiev bitingly remarked to Shostakovich:
"That theme of yours is rather Brahmsian..."
"Even a fool can hear that!" came the reply.
;According to the traditions of Menippean satire, everyone in The Nose is "mad." Every single character in Shostakovich’s opera practically begs for a psychoanalyst.
The District Constable, who sees rioters everywhere, is a maniac...
The Lady, the Gentleman, and the Traveler, who see robbers at every turn, are neurotics.
The crowd and the police are terrified of devils...
The Old Noblewoman claims that death itself came to fetch her...
Ivan Yakovlevich runs along Nevsky Prospekt with someone’s severed nose held in his foul-smelling hands...
A total chamber of horrors, wouldn't you say?
;The impression of the absurd is heightened by "nested" dreams: Kovalev’s dream within a dream, Ivan Yakovlevich’s hungover awakening... ("Why, I must still be asleep...")
No, these aren't just dreams—they are nightmares possessing the absolute illusion of reality...
As the plot progresses, the ghost of the District Constable appears and vanishes into thin air, and a newspaper advertisement pops up regarding a missing "werewolf-poodle with black fur"...
Granted, the "evil spirits" in Gogol aren't quite as comfortable yet as they would later be at Patriarch’s Ponds in The Master and Margarita, but even here, their audacity knows no bounds: showing up in the Kazan Cathedral—and for what? To pray!..
;The scenes are cross-cut sharply, just like in cinema. Or like in a dream...
All the phantoms, the "homunculi"—are walking puppets with a single, exaggerated character trait. The point is that these monsters appear as they do because they are "dreamt," refracted through the prism of a diseased imagination.
This is why the music inside the Kazan Cathedral sounds horrifyingly "out of tune," and why Ivan’s song with the balalaika and its idiotic lyrics is so tedious and dreary. Even the drawn-out song of the Police in ambush features such bizarre lyrics:
"Tucking his tail like a dog, like Cain, he began to tremble, and tobacco started leaking from his nose..."
;Does anyone still doubt that Shostakovich’s The Nose is a Menippean satire of the purest water?
"What exactly are we trying so hard to prove here?" the gentle reader might ask. The purity of genres only concerns the members of the academic clique, doesn't it?
Not at all. Menippean satire is less of a genre and more of a lifestyle. It is a carnivalesque buffoonery, a vehicle to smuggle truth through subtext. This is why writing a Menippean piece has always been considered an Act of Defiance.
How can we not recall another evergreen property of carnival laughter—its crowning and uncrowning power?
;Take Sergei Eisenstein, for example—a man remarkable not just for his heroic film Battleship Potemkin, but for the sheer theatricalization of his own life, and his occasionally indecent pranks.(3)
For instance, here is how he described going to pay his respects to Shumyatsky, the chief boss of Soviet cinema:
;"I’ll walk up, get completely ready," he said. "And he’ll step out from behind his desk and turn his backside to me, bending over. I’ll lean down as if to lick it, but at the very last second, I’ll go ahead and bite him right on the buttock."
;Is that not a Fool? A Court Jester? It's no wonder his favorite character in Ivan the Terrible is the Jester-Chaldean!
;Once, Shumyatsky recommended that Eisenstein "adapt something classical for the screen..."
"I am most grateful to you!" Eisenstein replied. "There is this lesser-known Russian classic, Barkov is his name. He wrote a monumental classic piece called Luka." (The boss had no idea the book was banned not for revolutionary reasons, but for pornographic ones!)
"Can I read it in one night?"
"You’ll read it overnight, you won't be able to tear yourself away, you’ll enjoy it immensely!"
"Barkov, Luka," Shumyatsky writes down a quick memo. "Procure immediately from the Lenin Public Library, to be directed by Eisenstein."
Meanwhile, Eisenstein, having shaken the Big Boss's hand, steps out into the reception room and bursts into a celebratory squat-dance.
"What is the matter with you, Sergei Mikhailovich?!" the terrified secretary gasps.
"I just... had your chairman!"
;But Eisenstein’s most grand prank was yet to come.
The film Ivan the Terrible, with its deliberate, operetta-like style, is the ultimate expression of the carnivalesque-picaresque spirit. Both parts function as one massive performance without spatial boundaries, operating like a trap.
Beginning with the crowning of the Tsar (and earning Stalin’s approval), the second part suddenly shifts to a total uncrowning—an indictment of a bloody tyrant. The Boss's reaction to the film was bound to expose him either way:
To ban it meant confirming the obviousness of the critique.
To approve it for wide release meant broadcasting that critique to the entire country.
;A definitive, Hamlet-style "mousetrap!" Though unlike Shakespeare’s version, this trap was double-sided: it caught the one who set it as well!
Of course, Eisenstein, acting as his own director, knew perfectly well that he was playing with death...
"The first case in history of suicide by filmmaking!" he commented on his situation.
;Thus, between the two parts of the film, a spatial-temporal aura was formed, where the barrier between audience and actors dissolved, and everyone became characters in a farce with an unpredictable finale...
;"But what do all these anecdotes about Eisenstein have to do with Shostakovich’s The Nose?" the patient reader will rightfully wonder.
On the surface, nothing at all. However, something allows us to view Shostakovich’s opera as the exact same "fig in a pocket," or a time bomb, as Eisenstein’s film...
Shostakovich also staged a carnival prank: he decided to amuse those capable of appreciating the beauty of subtext, while simultaneously "pulling the nose" of anyone lacking the humor and intellect to catch on.
But let’s get down to the meat of the matter, or rather, straight to The Nose!
;What is the fundamental difference between Gogol’s The Nose and Shostakovich’s The Nose?
;Let us examine the scene featuring a certain KHOZREV-MIRZA, who encounters the Nose in the Summer Garden.
While in Gogol’s text you will find only a passing mention of him ("...back when Khozrev-Mirza used to live here..."), Shostakovich unfolds something far more grandiose before the public. The scene of Khozrev-Mirza’s encounter with the Nose expands to an entirely different scale and is presented by the composer as nothing less than the climax of the opera! (Was the entire show perhaps staged solely for the sake of this scene?!..)
Drums roll, police whistles shriek, "fire engines roll out and hose down the crowd..."—this, by the way, is the author’s own stage direction in the score!
;And then, Khozrev-Mirza appears on stage—accompanied by a "retinue of eunuchs" (another remarkable authorial direction!)—and utters with a thick Caucasian (!) accent: "What a strange phenomenon of nature!"...
Who exactly is this Khozrev-Mirza, whose appearance is flanked by police, crowd dispersals, and a full arsenal of musically expressed aggression?.. Could it be the Man Himself?
;A certain Significant Personage loved to visit the Bolshoi Theatre. Two days prior to His arrival, the entire square would be cordoned off.
Behind the scenes, men in plain clothes checked the passes of the ballerinas, who were practically naked and had no idea where to put them. You’d have to tie it to your leg like a bathhouse token!
After the performance, the Significant Personage would summon the conductor to the Government Box and say:
"Comrade Samosud. Why did the performance today proceed b-without any flats?"
;Incidentally, we encounter the name Khozrev-Mirza in Gogol once more, in one of his most phantasmagoric novellas—it appears as an engraved portrait of "Khozrev-Mirza in a sheepskin cap" surrounded by portraits of "certain generals... with crooked noses."
An associative thread, thin as a spiderweb, stretches to the main character of the novella The Portrait—a dark, Eastern man, the living embodiment of an evil spirit. Gogol seems to polarize the world: on one side stands the artist-creator, on the other—the portrait, a dark, "diabolical phenomenon"...
The portrait is a crucial symbol. Is this not the very portrait that fell into the hands of Dostoevsky's Demons? Is this not the very idea of diabolical corruption that seized minds at the beginning of the century and ultimately triumphed in the visage of an Eastern despot?
Working on The Nose in 1927(!), did Shostakovich infuse the image of Khozrev-Mirza with a fresh, contemporary meaning?
;So that’s whose portrait it was! That is who he wanted to show The Nose to!
But was it really a nose?
;Let us set the operatic score aside for a moment to recall the fate of... psychoanalysis in Russia in the early twentieth century.
Born on Austro-German soil, the new doctrine easily took root in our Russian soil. It reached a point where, at the start of the century, Moscow and Saint Petersburg became global scientific centers for psychoanalysis, rivaling Berlin and Vienna.
A widespread obsession with psychoanalysis among the creative intelligentsia led to a total vulgarization of the theory. Psychoanalysts, turning classical literature inside out, enthusiastically exposed authors' "complexes" and "neuroses." Naturally, they didn't skip Gogol's The Nose: in the interpretation of dream symbolism, The Nose even served as a textbook illustration of a "sublimated castration complex that devolved into a persecutory delusion"—for those who understand such things!(4)
;The carnivalesque-humorous nature of The Nose manifested itself in a specific Rabelaisian treatment of the human body: according to this view, emphasis is placed on those parts of the body "where it is either open to the outside world, that is, where the world enters the body or emerges from it, or where the body itself projects into the world; that is, on openings, on convexities, on all kinds of branches and outgrowths: a gaping mouth, the reproductive organ, breasts, the phallus, a fat belly, the nose..."(5).
;Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, noted that Gogol's symbolism has a "bizarrely physical" and "physiological tint." In his stories, "the belly is an object of adoration, and the nose, being unquestionably the most sensitive and remarkable feature of Nikolai Vasilievich's own appearance, runs like a leitmotif through all his works in the role of a 'hero-lover.' The mundane act of snuffing tobacco turns into an outright wild party... Noses run, noses twitch, noses are handled lovingly or rudely; a drunkard tries to saw off another man's nose; the inhabitants of the Moon, according to a madman's diary, are Noses...
;This heightened awareness of the nose ultimately culminated in the story 'The Nose'—truly a hymn to this organ.
A Freudian might argue," Nabokov remarks, "that in Gogol's turned-inside-out world, human beings are placed upside down (Gogol himself insisted that a council of Paris doctors discovered his stomach was 'upside down'!), and therefore the role of the nose is obviously performed by another organ, and vice versa.
"But whether fantasy created the nose or the nose awakened fantasy matters not."(6)
;The censorship of a dream, according to Freud, operates on the principle of substituting an indecent organ with a decent one. Creative thinking operates on the exact same principle as a dream.
This is how psychoanalysts explain all the double entendres regarding the nose with which Gogol's story teems. The author makes it abundantly clear that a nose is an indispensable organ for frivolous interactions with the fair sex (a fact discovered primarily through its absence).
;Examples are plentiful:
Take the scene in the Kazan Cathedral: forgetting his "lampoonish appearance," Kovalev was about to smile at a "slender lady," when suddenly "he remembered that instead of a nose he had absolutely nothing, and tears squeezed from his eyes."
Furthermore, Kovalev read a theater notice in the newspaper, and encountering the name of a pretty actress, "the Major's hand reached for his pocket: to see if he had a blue banknote on him...—but the thought of the nose ruined everything!"
For the protagonist, the link between the loss of this body part and female schemes is absolute: he believed that Madame Podtochina, whose daughter he was happy to flirt with while avoiding a final proposal, must have decided to ruin him out of revenge and "hired some sort of witchcraft-women for the purpose."
;In short, a nose according to Gogol is a symbol of male dignity, self-assurance, and personal significance—all of which instantly vanish upon its loss:
"Without a nose, a man is heaven knows what: neither bird nor citizen, just take him and fling him out the window."
;As for Shostakovich, he thickens the plot regarding the phallic interpretation of The Nose even more aggressively.
;For instance, the author of the opera moves the scene with the Woman selling shirt-fronts to the very finale, heightening the erotic subtext. It unfolds like this: having regained his masculine dignity, Kovalev is so cheerful and self-assured that he not only tells an indecent joke to Podtochina and her daughter (which does not happen in Gogol!), but immediately propositions the very first pretty street vendor he sees:
"Listen here, my sweet, you come visit me at home, just ask where Major Kovalev lives..."
Incidentally, the mother, while inviting Platon Kuzmich to dinner, hints at a "readiness to satisfy him" in the event of a match (this phrasing is highly deliberate on Shostakovich’s part, whereas it is completely absent in Gogol).
;Let us assume Shostakovich intentionally sharpened the audience's focus on the indecently phallic meaning of The Nose. In that case, what a lewdly carnivalesque meaning fills the composer’s stage directions, such as "The Old Noblewoman chases the Nose," or "The Nose shoots its way out..." And what subtext is revealed by Ivan Sollertinsky's famous dictum: "The Nose is a long-range weapon"! Even Kovalev’s phrases addressed to the rebellious organ take on a totally unrated quality: "Come on, get back in, you fool!" or "I can even prop it up slightly with my hand in dangerous situations!"
;But that is not the primary point right now: what matters to us is that parallel to the development of psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, the new ideology ramped up its war against it. In 1925, the Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow was shut down, and a smear campaign immediately began through official state publications. Consequently, by the early 1930s, having become synonymous with pornography, psychoanalysis fell...
;The mere fact of Shostakovich turning to The Nose—in the summer of 1927!—is perhaps not a military exploit, but there is certainly something heroic about it... Especially given that during the preparations for the anniversary of the Great Revolution, it would have been far more appropriate to stage something like the oratorio The Path of October, rather than showing everyone The Nose from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre! But was it really a nose?.. Exactly!
Turning to Gogol's The Nose (the most "classical" text imaginable) is, in a sense, entirely analogous to "filming" Barkov's Luka!
;...So, what did Khozrev-Mirza actually see?
It turns out Shostakovich didn't show him a nose at all... The Maestro had an entirely different organ in mind... But then, the opera isn't about a nose either!
Its carnivalesque time and space expand far beyond the stage, overshooting the boundaries of the performance itself. They ripple out into the audience, the newspaper critics, and the rest of the citizenry, forcing them to unwittingly participate in this monstrous farce—whether they comprehend the core of what is happening or not (in which case, they truly act as long-eared "eunuchs").
;Incidentally, Khozrev-Mirza himself didn't actually see the Nose—as evidenced by his line muttered "to himself": "I see n-nothing!"
And his real-life prototype? Having seen and heard The Nose, did the Boss understand what was happening?.. Or did he decide to pretend that he, too, "saw n-nothing"?
;You might ask if there exists more concrete proof that Dmitry Dmitrievich’s opera is "about that"? Have mercy, that is the supreme advantage of the Aesopian language—you cannot catch it red-handed!
In fact, the rest of Shostakovich’s output shares this exact spirit, from his earliest opuses (The Donkey and the Nightingale (1922) based on Krylov's fable) all the way to the Satires to Words by Sasha Chorny, and the Romances on Texts from Crocodile Magazine. Think of the Thirteenth Symphony! The Fourteenth Symphony!
;How many dangerous carnival pranks did the Maestro pull off over the course of his creative life!
For instance, what about the melody of Stalin's favorite song, "Suliko," sung by the character "Comrade Yedinitsyn" (No. 1) in the Anti-Formalist Rayok?
Furthermore, in the finale of the First Cello Concerto, this Georgian tune displayed a "downright teasing character," according to the critic Lebedinsky: the "Suliko" theme appears and darts away, as if "sticking its tongue out at someone..."(7)
Or maybe it was showing them a nose? Or something else entirely?.. (You, discerning reader, have undoubtedly guessed...)
;What if, through the prism of the carnivalesque, we were to look at all the Master's works—those which "long-eared" musicologists dutifully used for decades to illustrate the so-called "method of socialist realism"?
Oh, how the respected public would be shocked by the Eleventh Symphony ("The Year 1905"), the Second ("To October"), the First of May Third, and even the Seventh ("Leningrad")!
;But that is a topic for a separate study.
One Nose is quite enough for the reader!
;Novosibirsk, 1992
;Notes
;Shostakovich, D. "Why 'The Nose'?" // The Worker's Theatre, 1930.
;Phrases from Gogol are so numerous that we include them without quotation marks. The same applies to Kharms and Dostoevsky.
;For a detailed account, see: Romm, M. Oral Stories. – Moscow, 1991.
;Freud, S. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
;Bakhtin, M. Rabelais and His World. – Moscow, 1983.
;Nabokov, V. "Nikolai Gogol" // Novy Mir, 1987, No. 4.
;Lebedinsky, L. "On Certain Musical Quotations in the Works of Shostakovich" // Novy Mir, 1990, No. 3.