Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was, as Vladimir Nabokov put it, "a strange creature", and a strange leitmotiv runs through his collected stories: there are several absent or errant noses. The rambling narrator of The Diary of a Madman asserts  apropos of nothing  that "only noses" live on the moon "and for the same reason, we can't see our own noses"; a character in Nevsky Prospect declares he has "no need of a nose" and asks a friend to cut his off. Gogol's nasal fixation is given full play in The Nose, in which a minor government official wakes up to find only a smooth patch of skin between his eyes and his mouth. He tracks his missing nose down to a cathedral, where it is dressed as a civil servant, in a uniform that suggests it now outranks him. Understandably enough, it refuses to return to his face.

This is outlandish stuff, but Gogol isn't just a purveyor of the weird and wacky. His narratives take on a compelling logic of their own and the details are by turn comic, sinister, and even touching. In The Overcoat, his last and probably his best short story, a "not very remarkable clerk" called Akaky Akakievich (a name that conjures the Russian word kaka, meaning shit) finds his long-established routine disrupted when his ancient and threadbare overcoat needs to be replaced. Upsetting as this is for him, his life is thrown into total disarray when his new, expensive-looking coat is stolen on its first outing. After he is refused help from an "important person", he dies, but comes back to haunt the site of the theft, ripping the overcoats off the backs of random passers-by.

The story, like all the others in this collection, builds its hilarious fantasy on solid observational foundations  the "wisp of straw or thread" permanently attached to Akaky's uniform or the "spirituous smell" in the stairwell of his tailor's building. Gogol doesn't ignore the conventions of realism, but, rather, jumbles them up, as in a dream.