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"The Nose" is a satirical short story by Nikolai Gogol. Written between 1835 and 1836, it tells of a St. Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own.

Mad, lascivious, sadistic and ridiculous, the provincial school teacher Peredonov torments his students and has hallucinatory fantasies about acts of savagery and degradation, yet to everyone else he is an upstanding member of society. As he pursues the idea of marrying to gain promotion, he descends into paranoia, arson, torture and murder.

Using a special blend of comedy, social commentary, and fantasy, Nikolai Gogol helped to introduce a realistic literary movement that led to the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The works included in this volume were written during Gogol's most productive period - a relatively short time of vigorous and brilliant creativity. As Leon Stilman states in his Afterword, "The reason for reading Gogol is that he is a great writer, in fact on of the most original, most delightfully and brilliantly inventive writers of the nineteenth century; one also whose perception of the world and whose art are often amazingly modern."