St. Petersburg is invoked as the urban setting of Nikolai Gogol’s story about Kovalev’s mysteriously absent nose. The city’s streets become the stage for an absurd reversal in which a body part appears independently as a person of higher social rank.

Appearance in the Story

Kovalev, a St. Petersburg official, loses his nose. After disappearing, it reappears on the streets of the capital in the form of a higher-ranking official. The city is the setting for the nose’s separate public existence and for the story’s tragicomic turns before it inexplicably returns to its owner’s face.

Narrative Significance

In this account, St. Petersburg gives the separation between person and bodily part a concrete social setting: the nose does not merely vanish but circulates through the capital bearing official status of its own. Its elevation in rank makes the story’s estrangement of the body intersect with the hierarchies represented by public life. The city is thus identified through the bizarre episode it hosts, rather than described independently.