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Russian noses ...
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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWJiNzI3ZWQwZTdiZDk3MTVkYTA3YmQ5YjUzOTVhOTk=
June 03, 2008, 7:00 a.m.May Days PastDiary of a month gone.By John Derbyshire
Raza Studies. Like the rest of you, I've been wondering how the lead organization lobbying on behalf of special privileges for Mexicans in the U.S.A. manages to get away with calling itself “National Council of La Raza.” Those last two words, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, mean “the race.” The idea, as I had it explained to me, is that by blending the European race with the Mesoamerican, Mexico has brought forth a new race, the mestizo or bronze race, which is claimed to be superior to both the contributing races, I suppose by dint of hybrid vigor. This bronze über-race is “La Raza.”
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Russian noses. My comments in last month’s diary about Vladimir Putin’s odd nasal obsession included a passing mention of the 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. The writer’s name sat there among my neurons for a while, then stirred and fired off a cascade of mental processes, most of them no doubt unconscious, that ended with my logging on to Abebooks.com and purchasing a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's 1944 book Nikolai Gogol.
I had owned the book in my student days, and relished its quality of concentrated Nabokovitude. For example: the first sentence in the book deals with Gogol’s death, while the last describes his birth. However, I lost the book in my wanderings, and retained little memory of its details. Well, here is the Russian nose-obsession in full-blown Nabokovian prose:
We shall meet the nasal leitmotiv throughout his [i.e. Gogol's] imaginative work and it is hard to find any other author who has described with such gusto smells, sneezes and snores. This or that hero comes into the story trundling, as it were, his nose in a wheelbarrow … There is an orgy of snufftaking … Noses drip, noses twitch, noses are lovingly or roughly handled; one drunkard attempts to saw off the nose of another; the inhabitants of the moon (so a madman discovers) are Noses.We [Russians] are nose-gay and nose-sad. The display of nasal allusions in a famous scene of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac is nothing in comparison to the hundreds of Russian proverbs and sayings that revolve around the nose. We hang it in dejection, we lift it up in glory; slack memory is advised to make a notch in it and it is wiped for you by your victor. It is used as a measure of length when referring to some impending event of a more or less threatening nature. … The drowsy man "angles" with it instead of nodding. A big one is said to bridge the Volga or to have been growing for a century. A tingle inside it portends a piece of good news while a pimple on its tip means a coming carouse. Any writer alluding, say, to a fly settling on a man's nose used to earn in Russia thereby the reputation of a humorist …
There you have it: Russia is the nasal nation.
I note by the way that next year is Gogol’s bicentenary. He shares that birth year with Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Edgar Allan Poe. What a year for geniuses! (Lincoln and Darwin were actually born on the same day.) Wikipedia gives Gogol’s birth date as March 31st; but I am more inclined to believe Nabokov, who says April 1 in his chronology appendix.
April 1st Born in the bright and muddy market town of Sorochintzy (stress accent on "chintz"), Province of Poltava, Little Russia …
If you want to get in shape for the Gogol bicentenary, you may as well start by learning to pronounce his name: GAW-gol, with the “l” palatalized. (As if you were to begin saying “-lyuh,” but left off the “-uh.” ) As Nabokov says: “One cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his name.”
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