I wasn't quite sure what to make of Nose. After all we never really find out why his nose departed his face or returned. Mostly what I took from it was that Gogol as a teacher at the university probably would have encountered many people like Kovalyov (an aristocratic wanna-be) and was poking fun of their pomposity. I read in the introduction to the collection that had the story in it that at the time he wrote Nose that across Europe the "look" of noses was a fashion fad.

I also found Kovalyov's name-dropping hilarious. It is funny to look back at the first half of the 19th century and see that people were doing such even then. I guess humans really don;t change much over time.