This absurdist story by Nikolai Gogol is a comical account of a vain, pompous and narcissistic Russian municipal official who goes looking for his wandering proboscis. The man is so obsessed with improving and capitalizing on his social position that he feels emasculated without it. Gogol was a pioneer in absurdist fiction, writing this story almost eighty years before Franz Kafka’s iconic Metamorphosis, and uses it here as a means of social criticism. Themes include insecurity, vanity (the superficiality of appearance and social status), institutional corruption and dysfunction, class (especially the way different social classes view and treat women).
