This is the story of a nose. No, really -- it's the story of a nose that leaves the face of an official in St. Petersburg (the Russian St. Petersburg, the one in Florida wasn't even a proper village when Gogol was alive). The nose leaves this man's face and wanders off to have a life of its own. It does strange stuff, too, What's to expect? Seriously, it's a nose. Nikolai Gogol. You've got to love him. In A History of Russian Literature, the critic D.S. Mirsky writes: "The Nose is a piece of sheer play, almost sheer nonsense. In it more than anywhere else Gogol displays his extraordinary magic power of making great comic art out of nothing."