An unusually strange event: Nikolai Gogol, ‘The Inspector,’ and ‘The Nose’

“The Nose” may be Nikolai Gogol’s most famous short story. It’s a surrealist — and self-consciously, self-awarely surrealist — story about a man whose nose disappears from his face and reappears in another man’s biscuits. And other places. There’s a moment toward the end of Susanne Fusso’s translation when the narrator says, “The strangest and most incomprehensible thing of all — is that writers can choose such plots.”

Well, yes.

Nikolai Gogol was a 19th-century Russian/Ukrainian novelist and playwright. One of his best-known plays, The Inspector, opens March 13 at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven.

And that short story, “The Nose,” might well be intertwined with the mythology of our little public radio show.

This hour, a look at the writer Nikolai Gogol.

GUESTS:

• Susanne Fusso: Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Wesleyan University and the author of a number of books, including Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol and a recent translation, The Nose and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol
• Yura Kordonsky: The adaptor and director of the Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of The Inspector

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Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

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