MARIA GOUGH - Specialized Research AI at MIT

MARIA GOUGH

Kentridge’s Nose*

Gogol’s grotesque raged around us; what were we to
understand as farce, what as prophecy? The incredible
orchestral combinations, texts seemingly unthinkable
to sing . . . the unhabitual rhythms . . . the incorporat-
ing of the apparently anti-poetic, anti-musical, vulgar,
but what was in reality the intonation and parody of
real life—all this was an assault on conventionality.

—Grigorii Kozintsev (1969),
on the 1930 Leningrad
premiere of The Nose

If one holds onto the discoveries, the risks and inven-
tions of the Russian avant-garde . . . one also has to
find a place not simply to acknowledge, but to house
the faith animating the work of its members—their
belief in a transformed society.

—William Kentridge (2008)

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In his quest for an all-out renewal of operatic form, Peter Gelb, the General
Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York since 2006, packed the 2009–2010
season with eight new productions, essentially bringing to a close the reign of Franco
Zeffirelli, whose florid, love-it or hate-it Neapolitanesque scenography has more or
less dominated the proscenium for decades, at least with respect to the Italian reper-
toire. With just one exception, all the new additions to the Met’s inventory this past

*
Sincere thanks to Tom Cummins for generously enabling my graduate seminar to attend
the premiere of The Nose at the Met, to Jodi Hauptman for arranging entry to the performance of
William Kentridge’s theatrical monologue I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine at the Museum of
Modern Art, to Leah Dickerman and the October editors for inviting the present reflection, and to
Eve-Laure Moros Ortega, Ian Forster, Art 21 Inc., Marian Goodman Gallery, Sam Johnson, Hugh
Truslow, and Adam Lehner for various forms of invaluable assistance.

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OCTOBER

year were directed by professionals from the world of the performing arts, such as
Luc Bondy, Mary Zimmerman, Bartlett Sher, Patrice Chéreau, Richard Eyre, and
Pierre Audi. The single exception to the rule was The Nose (1927–28), an operatic
transposition of Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist short story “The Nose” (1836) by the very
young composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975), which was directed and co-
designed by the internationally acclaimed visual artist William Kentridge. A co-pro-
duction with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and the Opéra national de Lyon, The
Nose premiered at the Met on March 5, 2010, and ran for a total of six performances.1
Kentridge is not the first visual artist to have been invited into the New York
house. Under Rudolf Bing in 1967 Marc Chagall designed Mozart’s The Magic Flute,
while in 1981 Anthony Bliss engaged David Hockney to design various compositions
by Satie, Poulenc, Ravel, and Stravinsky.2 But to the best of my knowledge Kentridge
is the only one to have been charged with direction overall, rather than scenography
and/or costume design alone. Gelb’s reaching beyond the professional delimitation
of his own field is an enterprising response to the crisis in which opera—like so many
other major art forms—perennially finds itself in the modern world, and his choice
of Kentridge extremely savvy: although best known for his extraordinarily innovative
work in and across a range of still and moving image media, most especially charcoal
drawing and stop-motion animation, the artist has long had an interest also in the-
ater and live performance, and recently directed several puppet operas (including
Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses), as well as a full-scale production for the Théâtre
royal de la monnaie in Brussels (The Magic Flute).

The present essay reflects upon Kentridge’s production of The Nose pri-
marily from the point of view of its visual aspect. My argument is that the artist’s
extreme visualization of this remarkably experimental work brought to the fore
a new reading or inflection of it, one having to do less with its indisputably satir-
ical register and more with its thematization of metamorphosis and, more
broadly, social transformation. I begin with a few words about Gogol’s famous
story, and of Shostakovich’s transposition of it, before turning to a discussion of
the specific characteristics and significance of Kentridge’s production at the
Met. I then make an excursus into two of the preparatory projects through
which the artist fueled his thinking about the stakes and potentialities of the
opera, and conclude with an examination of his staging of its seventh scene,
which is perhaps its most crucial.

In response to Gelb’s initial invitation to stage an opera by Shostakovich,
Kentridge proposed The Nose, the composer’s first experiment in the medium.

Satire

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William Kentridge, director, Luc De Wit, associate director, and Valery Gergiev, conductor,

1.
The Nose by Dmitri Shostakovich, Metropolitan Opera, New York, March 5, 2010.
2.
p. 118.

Dorothy Spears, “Laughter in the Dark: William Kentridge,” Art in America (December 2009),

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William Kentridge. I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine. 2008.
Photograph by John Hodgkiss.

OCTOBER

Though best known for his instrumental compositions, Shostakovich also sought
to compose at the intersection of music and drama, embarking on more than a
dozen operatic projects over the course of his lifetime.3 Of these projects, The
Nose is one of only two that he managed to complete and bring to the stage (the
other being the rather better known Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District [1930–32]). As
the story goes, the twenty-year-old Shostakovich, flush from the success of his First
Symphony (1926), was casting about in summer 1927 for an opera to stage. Faced
with an apparent dearth of contemporary Soviet operas and a lack of interest
among his literary compatriots in adapting their own work for the stage, he went
rifling through the nineteenth century for a story to use as a basis for a libretto,
eventually settling on “The Nose.”4

An absurdist dressing down of imperial Russian bureaucracy and the police
state, Gogol’s story tells the tale of, and pokes serious fun at, a low-ranking, skirt-chas-
ing, buffoonish bureaucrat in St. Petersburg, one Collegiate Assessor Platon Kuzmich
Kovalyov, who awakes on the morning of March 25 to discover that his nose is miss-
ing. Setting about its recovery, Kovalyov soon chances upon his wayward appendage
praying in Kazan Cathedral. But, to his further consternation, it has now attained the
physical stature and bearing of a gentleman and a much higher rank to boot—that
of State Councilor—and thus refuses to recognize its former owner. Kovalyov’s nose
is now the Nose, its own ontological subject. On the lam around town for some two
weeks, the Nose is eventually arrested while attempting to board a stagecoach bound
for Riga, and returned to Kovalyov in the form once more of a mere appendage.
After a few further tribulations, Kovalyov awakes on April 7 to find his nose back in
place, as inexplicably as it had gone missing. With policemen of various ranks making
their appearance on almost every page of “The Nose,” hounding all and sundry, the
setting is not just the grandiloquent imperial city but also the police state that binds
and constricts it.5

Literary scholars have debated whether Gogol’s little story belongs most
properly to the genre of satire, irony, parody, grotesque, farce, burlesque, comedy,
or even tragedy, or some hybrid combination thereof. For the purposes of the pre-
sent essay suffice it to say that the vogue for Gogol in the Soviet Union in the
1920s cast the writer as a social satirist, though one with an absurdist rather than
didactic aesthetic temperament. This was the overriding spirit, for example, of
the avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production of Gogol’s play
The Inspector-General (1836–42), which was the highlight of the 1926–27 theater
season in Moscow. Shostakovich saw The Inspector-General numerous times while he

3.
See Rosamund Bartlett, “Shostakovich as opera composer,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Shostakovich, ed. Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), pp. 179–97.
4.
Dmitri Shostakovich, “Pochemu ‘Nos’?” Rabochii i teatr 3 ( January 15, 1930), p. 11. See
“Editor’s Note” to Dmitri Shostakovich, Nos: Opera v trekh deistviiakh, desiati kartinakh, soch. 15 (Moscow:
Muzyka, 1981), n.p.
5.
duction by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 42–70.

Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose,” in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (1835), trans. with an intro-

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Kentridge’s Nose

was living in the Meyerholds’ apartment and employed as a pianist in the
Meyerhold Theater, a period that coincided with his initial work on The Nose.
When it came time to launch the latter, the composer’s numerous statements to
the press invariably characterized Gogol’s short story in terms of satire: it is “a dev-
astating satire of the epoch of Nicholas I,” he wrote in one article, referring to the
story’s various protagonists as “all perfect nonentities, shown against the back-
ground of a bureaucratic police state [politseisko-chinovnicheskoi epokhi].”6

Shostakovich’s operatic transposition of the story comprises three acts
with ten scenes altogether, which is a substantial number for a production that
runs just over 100 minutes. (Even before it was staged, Laurel Fay tells us, “critics
noted a ‘cinematic’ quality in the pacing and alternation of the scenes and
entr’actes, which created the effect of a succession of ‘frames.’”7) Its nontonal and
nonlyrical style was aggressively experimental for the period, and in some quar-
ters is still considered so today. Salient are its parodic treatments of popular music
and dances, both old (galop, polka, march, waltz) and new (foxtrot), as well as its
musical evocations of the baser sonic phenomena and rituals of everyday life
(snoring, shaving). The full score was written for a small orchestra—essentially a
chamber but with the crucial addition of an extra fleet of percussionists—but it
calls for at least thirty vocal soloists (each of whom must double or triple up in
order to cover the seventy-eight singing and nine speaking roles). The vocal score
is “declamatory” and “angular,” as Fay puts it, demanding a wide range of unusual
vocal techniques.8

The libretto was written by Shostakovich, in collaboration with the stage
writers Georgi Ionin and Aleksandr Preis, along with a little input from the mod-
ernist prose writer Yevgeny Zamyatin.9 Staying close to Gogol, they transposed all
of his original dialogue, but also made some crucial additions of their own. For
example, an arioso in Act II, Scene Six—when a crushed Kovalyov realizes the
futility of his various attempts to retrieve his nose—affords his character consider-
ably greater emotional depth than Gogol had given it, thereby fostering in the
audience at least some empathy for this otherwise mostly unsympathetic principal.
The Nose premiered in January 1930 at the Malyi Opera Theater in
Leningrad. Notwithstanding the fact that 1930 was the height of the Cultural
Revolution—the attempt to proletarianize all aspects of Soviet life—the Malyi had a
policy of fostering experimental productions due in large part to the perspicacity of

Dmitri Shostakovich, “K prem’ere ‘Nosa,’” Rabochii i teatr 24 ( June 16, 1929), p. 12; quoted

Laurel E. Fay, “The Punch in Shostakovich’s Nose,” in Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris

6.
in “Editor’s Note,” n.p.
7.
Schwarz, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), p. 234.
8.
Ibid., p. 232.
Dmitri Shostakovich, The Nose: An Opera in Three Acts with Ten Scenes (1928), libretto by Y.
9.
Zamyatin, G. Ionin, A. Preis, D. Shostakovich. My citations to the libretto are to the version published
in the liner notes (pp. 24–69) accompanying the recording of The Nose by Valery Gergiev (conductor)
and the Mariinsky Soloists, Orchestra, and Chorus at the Mariinsky Concert Hall, St. Petersburg, July
15–23, 2008.

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OCTOBER

its artistic director and conductor, Samuil Samosud, who was committed to the
renovation and modernization of operatic theater.10 Critics were quick to note
the influence of Meyerhold’s The Inspector-General on both the dramaturgy (direct-
ed by Nikolai Smolich) and staging (designed by Vladimir Dmitriev) of the
opera.11 Archival photographs suggest that Dmitriev set The Nose in period style—
that of early nineteenth-century St. Petersburg—but with a conspicuously low-
brow twist and even a certain circus-like physicality.12 The avant-garde theater and
film director Grigori Kozintsev, then a leading member of the Factory of the
Eccentric Actor (FEKS), recalled that “Dmitriev’s sets spun and reeled to the sounds
of rollicking galops and dashing polkas; Gogol’s phantasmagoria was transformed
into sound and color. The particular imagery of Russian art that was linked to
urban folklore—the signs of taverns, shops, and picture booths, cheap dance
orchestras—all burst into the kingdom of Aida and Il Trovatore.”13

The Nose enjoyed a substantial run of sixteen performances at the Malyi,
and the Bolshoi Theater even hired Meyerhold to direct a production in Moscow,
though this last was never realized.14 Assailed by proletarian critics,15 the opera
nevertheless garnered strong support from Pravda’s regular music critic, Yevgeny
Braudo, who commended Shostakovich for his “social satire” on the imperial peri-
od, pointing in particular to several scenes that were not in Gogol’s original story

10.
See Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 54. On the
Cultural Revolution, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War,” in Cultural Revolution in
Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 8–40.
See, for example, M. Iankovskii, “‘Nos’ v Malom opernom teatre,” Rabochii i teatr 5 ( January
11.
26, 1930), p. 7. In his graduate-student report to the Leningrad conservatory, Shostakovich stated that
in The Nose he had “symphonized Gogol’s text producing not an ‘absolute’ or ‘pure’ symphony but a
‘theatre symphony’ as represented by . . . Meyerhold’s production of Inspector General,” (unpublished
manuscript, May 1928), Arkhiv LOLGK; quoted in “Editor’s Note,” n.p. In an undated letter to his
friend Ivan Sollertinsky, Shostakovich enthused that “the play that impresses me most is still The
Inspector-General at Meyerhold’s theater. I have now seen it through about three times. Seven times in
all. The more I see it, the more I like it”; see Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich by Dmitri and
Ludmilla Sollertinsky, trans. (slightly modified) Graham Hobbs and Charles Midgley (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 50. The Meyerhold-Shostakovich relationship is debated by near-
ly all scholars of the opera, but see esp. Larisa Bubennikova, “K probleme khudozhestvennogo vza-
imodeistviia muzykal’nogo i dramaticheskogo teatrov (postanovka V. Meierkhol’da ‘Revizor’—1926 g.,
opera D. Shostakovicha ‘Nos’—1928 g.),” in Problemy muzykal’noi nauki 3 (1975), pp. 38–63.
12.
For rare reproductions, see M. Iankovskii, “‘Nos’ v Malom opernom teatre,” p. 6; S. Gres,
“Ruchnaia bomba anarkhista,” Rabochii i teatr 10 (February 21, 1930), p. 6; and Ia. V. Olesich, ed., Dvadtsat’
let gosudarstvennogo akademicheskogo Malogo opernogo teatra, 1918–1938 (Leningrad: Teatr, 1939), n.p.
Grigorii Kozintsev, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 4 (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1984), p. 254,
13.
quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994),
p. 75 (emphasis added). As a member of the FEKS group, Kozintsev produced a film adaption of Gogol’s
short story “The Overcoat” in 1926. Shortly after the completion of The Nose, Shostakovich composed a
score for live performance with the silent film New Babylon, which Kozintsev co-directed with Leonid
Trauberg in 1928–29.
See Fay, “The Punch in Shostakovich’s Nose,” p. 234. In the Soviet Union, The Nose was not
14.
seen again until 1974, the year before the composer’s death. In the United States, it was first staged in
Santa Fe in 1965, and has enjoyed two recent productions in addition to that by the Metropolitan: at
Bard’s Summerscape festival in 2004, which was devoted to “Shostakovich and His World,” and in
Opera Boston’s 2008–2009 season.
15.

See Gres, “Ruchnaia bomba anarkhista,” p. 6.

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Kentridge’s Nose

but rather inserted by the composer for explicitly satirical purposes. In 1933, in a
review essay on the contemporary performing arts, Braudo attributed to The Nose
groundbreaking satirical force: “The greatest shock to our conservative musicians
so far has been . . . The Nose . . . . This work, a model of caustic wit, is the most
strongly satirical opera staged so far. Shostakovich has a remarkable sensitivity to
social implications.”16

Metamorphosis

Under Kentridge’s direction, The Nose arrived at its most extreme visual-
ization to date. Its scenography and costuming broached a range of period styles,
but the artist staged the opera not so much in the trappings of specific historical
moments as in the dynamic formal language of a major body of artistic produc-
tion, that of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde. By drawing upon the work of
Shostakovich’s counterparts in the visual and performing arts—Meyerhold,
Liubov Popova, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Gustavs Klucis, Varvara
Stepanova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and especially El Lissitzky—Kentridge sought
to reconnect The Nose to the world of advanced aesthetic and political ambition
within and out of which its composition had developed.

Co-designed with Sabine Theunissen, the sets comprised various innova-
tions. Ivan Yakovlevich’s modest barber shop, and Kovalyov’s tiny apartment (with
its conspicuously too-short bed, perhaps a humorous aside on the broader
metaphorical significance of his noselessness), for example, were constructed as
small boxy interiors decorated in period style. Suspended within the vast dimen-
sions of the Met’s cavernous proscenium—the distance from the stage floor to the
rigging loft is over a hundred feet—they looked something like repurposed ship-
ping containers floating in space. Kentridge had his singers move in and out of
these cramped interiors through not only regular doors but also ceiling trapdoors
and, in one instance, by a rudimentary rope and pulley system.

Another set construction was multifunctional, revolving on its own axis to
serve as the residence of the Chief of Police (Act II, Prologue), and, in its second
orientation, as the newspaper office where Kovalyov attempts to place a lost notice
concerning his errant nose (Act II, Scene Five). What was especially compelling in
the switch between these two scenes was that the singers involved in the first
remained on the moving construction during its half-revolution to the second,
gymnastically recostuming and thus repurposing themselves—in full view of the
audience—from policemen into porters placing newspaper advertisements. At
about mid-height, a rudimentary ramp constructed from unpainted wooden slats
was slung diagonally across the breadth of the proscenium; traversed by different
singers throughout the performance, this ramp helped to establish an important

16.
Braudo, “Concerts, Opera, Ballet in Russia Today,” Modern Music 10, no. 4 (May–June 1933), p. 218.

See Evgenii Braudo, “Prem’era ‘Nosa’ Shostakovicha,” Pravda (February 12, 1930), p. 6; and

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OCTOBER

theatrical counterpoint to the main action occurring on the stage floor below.

On the one hand, these sets—and the expectations about the intense
physicality of dramatic action that they seemed to bring with them—recalled
nothing so much as the Constructivist “acting apparatus,” a new typology of set
construction invented by Stepanova and Popova for Meyerhold’s biomechanical
productions in the early 1920s. For the main stage of Fernand Crommelynck’s
farce, The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922), for example, Popova built a skeletal wood-
en apparatus comprising stepladders, scaffolding, platforms, and revolving doors
for the acrobatics of Meyerhold’s ever-moving actors, thereby recreating the
proscenium as gymnasium. Relatedly, the bold graphics of Stepanova’s costumes
for Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin’s The Death of Tarelkin (1922), and Constructivist
graphic design more generally, seem to have both found their way into Greta
Goiris’s costuming for The Nose. Kovalyov, to mention just one protagonist, sported
a brilliant white waistcoat on which a giant upper-case letter “K” was printed in
reverse—and thus defamiliarized—perhaps a pun on the so-called back-to-front
“R” (Я) that is the Russian letter “ia” and word for “I,” or simply a nod to
Kentridge’s newfound enthusiasm for Cyrillic letterforms.

On the other hand, the analogy to Constructivist theater or costume
design only goes so far. In dressing The Nose’s seventy-eight roles, Goiris drew inspi-
ration from a vast repertoire of European and Asian costumes, while Kentridge, for
his part, abandoned altogether the revelation to the audience of the back wall of
the stage, a revelation that characterized so much Constructivist theater chez

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Dmitri Shostakovich. The Nose.
Production directed and designed by
William Kentridge. 2010.
Photograph by Ken
Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

Kentridge’s Nose

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Shostakovich. The Nose. Production directed and designed by William
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Meyerhold, valorized as it was as a rudimentary way of laying bare the process of
the play’s own production. Instead, Kentridge moved The Nose in the opposite
direction, that of spectacularization. His main backdrop comprised a giant noisy
collage of newspaper and encyclopedia articles, a map of St. Petersburg, portrait
engravings bedecked with red wedges and circles in lieu of noses, agit-prop slogans
shouted in multiple languages, and a miscellany of other printed matter. But most
fundamental of all to Kentridge’s spectacularization of The Nose was his deploy-
ment of video projection. Edited by Catherine Meyburgh and delivered by a single,
extremely powerful machine stationed at the rear of the auditorium, a vast array of
projections saturated almost the entire production, creating a sheer surfeit of
images that effectively conjured something like—to borrow Kozintsev’s pithy com-
ment on the opera’s Leningrad premiere—“Gogol’s phantasmagoria.” Whether
still or moving, slow or fast, miniature or gigantic, singular or complex, these pro-
jections helped to transpose much of the drama from the horizontal space of the
stage floor onto the vertical plane of the screen, thereby transforming the Met into
a hybrid opera-movie house.

Over the last several decades the use of film or video projection in oper-
atic performance has moved from the experimental periphery into the main-
stream, but it is worth remembering that among the first major practitioners of
moving-image projection in live performance were vanguard directors such as
Meyerhold and Erwin Piscator in the 1920s, and Bertolt Brecht in the early 1930s,
each of whom grappled with the question of the impact of the new medium of
film upon their theatrical or operatic craft, and the possibilities for innovation
that it opened up. The apparatus Popova installed for Meyerhold’s production of

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OCTOBER

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Sergei Tret’iakov. The Earth in Turmoil. Production directed by
Vselovod Meyerhold and designed by Liubov Popova. 1923.

The Earth in Turmoil (1923), a play by Sergei Tret’iakov adapted from Marcel
Martinet’s La Nuit (1921), registered this exploration: comprising a stripped-down
gantry crane, it was hung with a large film screen for the projection of Dziga
Vertov’s Kino pravda newsreels during the performance. Such film sequences embed-
ded in opera or theater in the 1920s and 1930s typically had one of two functions:
most often their role was documentary in ambition—to expand the audience’s
understanding of the historical context of the live action unfolding before them—
the assumption typically being that film was a veristic medium. Sometimes, however,
such projections also had a critical role—to contrast with the live action on stage—
and thereby provoke the audience’s more sustained reflection upon the latter.17

Both of these functions were evident in certain moments of Kentridge’s
projections for The Nose, notwithstanding the production’s phantasmagorical thrust.
The prologue to Act II delivered an example of film’s both documentary and criti-
cal expansion of the stage: while Kovalyov was en route to beseech the Chief of
Police for assistance in the recovery of his nose—Kentridge had him furiously pedal-
ing a much too small bicycle, à la Ubu in the artist’s print Ubu Tells the Truth: Act IV,
Scene 7 (1996)—projected overhead were a few seconds of documentary film

Brecht discusses his usage of film projection in the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of
17.
Mahagonny in notes he prepared for Hanns Eisler in 1942, which are published in Brecht on Film and
Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 13, and in “The German Drama:
Pre-Hitler,” The New York Times (November 24, 1935). In the latter he attributes the innovation to
Piscator. On Piscator’s projections, see Sheila McAlpine, Visual Aids in the Productions of the First Piscator-
Bühne, 1927–28 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990).

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Kentridge’s Nose

footage showing pedestrians milling like ants on Nevsky Prospekt, the main boule-
vard of St. Petersburg. This footage expanded the audience’s grasp of the political
geography of the moment, instilling a sense of the vast scale of the imperial city,
in contrast to the puniness of its human subjects.

But the critical function of projection in The Nose was most especially felt
with respect to Kentridge’s dramatic foregrounding of the character of the Nose,
and thus his reorientation of the main thrust of the opera overall. Shostakovich’s
libretto gives the Nose—sung at the Met by the Canadian tenor Gordon Gietz—a
mere handful of vocal lines, extremely difficult ones but nevertheless only two or
three minutes worth at most. (Had the libretto not also directed the Nose to scam-
per about on stage from time to time the audience would have barely encoun-
tered him at all; for this unsung part Goiris and Kentridge outfitted another actor
in a giant papier-mâché nose.) The minor role of the Nose is in strong contrast to
that which Shostakovich affords Kovalyov, an extremely demanding part sung by
the Brazilian baritone Paolo Szot, who was on stage for much of the production,
and singing for most if not all that time. By deploying multiple projections of the
Nose throughout the performance, Kentridge redressed this imbalance, restoring
to the latter character by visual means the dramatic role of a principal. While
Kovalyov was bemoaning the loss of his nose (Act I, Scene Three), for example, a
giant image of the Nose sneaking past outside his bedroom window appeared on
the screen overhead. On occasions, this projected Nose even intervened directly
in the action occurring on the stage floor. The net effect of these dramatic
appearances and interventions was to shift our attention away from an exclusive
preoccupation with the target of Gogol and Shostakovich’s satire—the bureaucrat
Kovalyov—and toward instead the life and adventures of his now fully emancipat-
ed former appendage.

In addition to its dramatic participation in the drama, the Nose also
appeared in a number of projections Kentridge created to accompany the score’s
var ious instrument al interludes. (There was a nice inver sion here: while
Shostakovich composed scores for live performance with silent films, Kentridge
created filmic accompaniment for the composer.) These projections comprised
extremely rapid montages of the artist’s signature stop-motion animation com-
bined with live action and archival film footage. In the main, their effect was syn-
thesizing rather than contrapuntal. For example, Kentridge calibrated the wild
rhythmic energy of Shostakovich’s ground-breaking interlude (Act I, between
Scene Two and Scene Three) for nine unpitched percussive instruments—trian-
gle, tambourine, castenets, snare drum, tom-tom, suspended cymbal, ordinary
cymbals, bass drum, and tam-tam—with an equally percussive montage of moving
images that began with the phrase “‘Search out reliable anti-futurists’ (Lenin)”
spinning around and around as if wound upon an invisible revolving fair-ground
barrel. In evident homage to Malevich and Lissitzky, a barrage of red and white
squares and circles then hurtled across the screen, coalescing for a brief instant

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OCTOBER

before pulling apart again. These were followed by scrappy fragments of torn
black paper that became a horse (Don Quixote’s Rocinante) before our eyes. An
old-fashioned Russian typewriter was played by invisible hands, and then, all of a
sudden, Shostakovich was at the piano with a giant nose for a head. A more the-
matic form of synthesis shaped the accompaniment to the exhilarating orchestral
“Galop” (Act I, between Scene Three and Scene Four), which included multiple
configurations of the Nose striking a pose on the ever-skinny Rocinante.

For some critics, the unrelenting presence and pace of projections ulti-
mately distracted from rather than complemented Shostakovich’s music,18 which
raises an old and much contested issue, namely the degree to which image, action,
and music compete with one another in opera. In a recent interview with Kentridge,
Calvin Tomkins confessed that with respect to the artist’s production of The Magic
Flute (2005) there were times when he felt “that the visual effects were a distraction
from the music.” To this Kentridge responded: “Some people hated it because there
was too much to watch.” The having of too-much-to-watch is a problem, in some
quarters, because it implies a loss of the ability to grasp the putative totality, a loss of
mastery. But for Kentridge, this is simply not a problem because, in his opinion,
“opera is an impure medium” that combines many different elements.19

Shostakovich himself seems not to have weighed in on the image-music
side of the operatic triangle (image-action-music)—though he did apparently
want to create a new genre, which he called “film-opera”20—but given his oppo-
sition to the traditional hypostatization of music in opera, he might well have
agreed with Kentridge. The composer did address over and over again, howev-
er, the question of the relationship between music and drama in his numerous
statements apropos The Nose. “In composing my opera,” he wrote in 1930, for
example, “I was least of all guided by the idea that an opera is primarily a musi-
cal work. Action and music are of equal importance in The Nose and neither is
allowed to dominate over the other.”21 In another statement, he wrote: “Music
in this spectacle does not play a self-sufficient role. The stress is on the presen-
tation of the text.”22 In fact, one of the reasons he gives for having chosen
Gogol’s story in the first place was that its “intricate plot [gave] rise to many
effective theatrical situations.”23 It was precisely for this reason that he was so

18.
See, for example, the comments of Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic for
The New York Times, in conversation with Roberta Smith, Dwight Garner, and Daniel J. Wakin in
“Regarding ‘The Nose’ and the Eye and the Ear,” The New York Times (March 11, 2010).
19.
See Calvin Tomkins, “Lines of Resistance: William Kentridge’s Rough Magic,” The New Yorker
( January 18, 2010), p. 58. For a remarkable new study of the problem of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which is
partly at issue here, see Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010), esp. chapter 8.
20.
21.
teatr, 1930), p. 6; quoted in “Editor’s Note,” n.p.
22.
Nose,” p. 231.
23.

Bartlett, “Shostakovich as opera composer,” p. 195.
Dmitri Shostakovich, Nos: opera v 3-kh aktakh po N. V. Gogoliu (Leningrad: Gos. Malyi opernyi

See Shostakovich, “Pochemu ‘Nos’?” p. 11; quoted in Fay, “The Punch in Shostakovich’s

Shostakovich, “K prem’ere ‘Nosa,’” p. 12.

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Kentridge’s Nose

opposed to the concert performance of the score in 1929.

The fundamental impurity of operatic form may render irrelevant
objections based on assumptions about the primacy of one medium over anoth-
er. But there still remains the question of whether or not the endless prolifera-
tion of citations to, and animations of, the work of the Russian and Soviet avant-
garde in Kentridge’s staging of The Nose amounts to something more than, in
the end, a new form of scenographic ornament. Ultimately I believe that it does,
because these citations and animations play a major role in shifting our under-
standing of the opera away from its hitherto dominant and exclusive interpreta-
tion in terms of satire. Without disavowing the satirical dimension altogether,
Kentridge refocuses the audience’s attention—through a new emphasis on the
primarily visual figure of the Nose—on a subject of cardinal but underacknowl-
edged importance in the very construction of story and opera alike, namely, the
concept of metamorphosis. His staging reminds us of something so basic to their
shared narratives that it may be easily forgotten: that, altogether fantastically, a
part of the human body is transformed into an autonomous being. In fore-
grounding the generative role of metamorphosis in The Nose, Kentridge thereby
opens the door to the myriad potential metaphorical ramifications of this
ancient poetic concept, beyond the realm of physical embodiment alone to that
of social and political transformation more broadly. In his staging, the Nose
becomes a figure of revolution, not just of the October Revolution—though that
remains the Ur-example, it is true—but of any and all attempts to bring about
fundamental social change. The Nose is thus Rosa Luxemburg and Lev Trotsky,
but also Steve Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness movement in South
Africa who was beaten to death while in police custody in Port Elizabeth in
September 1977.24 That the Nose is ultimately beaten and repressed, the pro-
duction seems to suggest, is no reason not to honor and celebrate those pre-
cious instances of intrepid faith in the possibility of transformation, and thus
also to lament their passing. “Even as utopia is dead,” Kentridge writes, “we hang
onto its skeleton, hoping to resurrect it through a wish, a will.”25

This interpretive shift—from satire to the celebration of, and lament for,
utopia—was not something arrived at overnight; rather, it emerged during the long
course of Kentridge’s preparation of The Nose over the past four years. Much of this
preparation took place in his Johannesburg studio, and resulted in the creation of a
network of related, ancillary projects. Common to these projects is the near-total

Revolution and Terror

24.
In this connection it is worth noting that the artist’s father, Sir Sydney Kentridge, a promi-
nent anti-apartheid lawyer at the time, was the barrister who represented the Biko family at the
inquest into his death; see Donald Woods, Biko (New York: Paddington Press Ltd, 1978), pp. 176–260.
25.
William Kentridge, I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, a theatrical monologue (2008), pub-
lished in this issue, p. 40.

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OCTOBER

eclipsing of Kovalyov in favor of an exploration of the life of the Nose, rather in the
spirit of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.26 No doubt the relative unscriptedness of the Nose’s
role in the libretto encouraged Kentridge in this direction, affording his imagination
free rein, one drawing leading to the next until the hitherto secret life of the Nose
finally came into view for the very first time. These projects then became something
of a sourcebook for the projections that animate Kentridge’s production at the Met.

The life of the Nose is recorded in a portfolio of thirty etchings conceived by
Kentridge between December 2006 and May 2009; this was released in an edition of
fifty and also published in book form under the title William Kentridge Nose (2010).27
The portfolio tracks the numerous encounters of the Nose as he goes about his newly
autonomous life in St. Petersburg, though it would be better to say “invents,” since so
few of these episodes are to be found in Gogol’s story. Kentridge portrays, for exam-
ple, the Nose’s private visits with various nude and clothed ladies (Nose 1, 2, 4, 23),
some famous from the history of art. To one of these women he makes love (Nose 10),
this last perhaps somewhat substantiating Ivan Yermakov’s old reading of “The Nose”
in terms of castration anxiety (a reading that Kentridge, however, refutes).28 The

See Kentridge’s references to Cervantes as a precedent for Gogol—and for himself—in ibid.,

26.
p. 36.
27.
The print media involved are sugar-lift aquatint, drypoint, and engraving, with the occa-
sional addition of background etching. The portfolio was printed by the David Krut Print Workshop
in Johannesburg, with Jillian Ross, Niall Bingham, and Mlungusi Kongisa as the editioning printers.
28.
See Ivan Yermakov, “‘The Nose’” (1923), in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert A.
Maguire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 156–98. Yermakov was a psychoanalyst
with strong literary interests. For Kentridge’s rejection of the psychoanalytic reading, see Matthew
Gurewitsch, “As Plain as the Nose on his Stage,” The New York Times (February 28, 2010).

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Kentridge.
Nose 29.
2009.

Kentridge’s Nose

Nose also enjoys mounting a series of Rocinantesque equestrian monuments (Nose
6, 7, 8, 9 ), and heading/hooding—the ambiguity is surely deliberate—all manner
of objects and beings, inter alia, a sculptural bust (Nose 25), a marble statue of a
male nude in contrapposto (Nose 27), a female nude (Nose 14), Anna Pavlova (Nose
15), Angelina Ballerina (Nose 16 ), and Trotsky (Nose 17 ). The Nose even encoun-
ters the Ur-icon of the Revolution, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International
(1920) (Nose 3). But one print comprises his police mugshot (Nose 13 ), thus fore-
shadowing his violent end: the Police Inspector holds a gun to his head (Nose 29 )
and fires, blasting the Nose to smithereens (Nose 30). The Revolution is over. (An
animated projection of these last two prints appeared in Act III, Scene Nine of the
opera, in which Kovalyov is celebrating the return of his nose. There, the death of
the Nose was memorialized by a screen awash with almost melting black frag-
ments—it was the most painterly and abstract filmic sequence in the entire pro-
duction, and extremely moving.)

The Nose’s trajectory from euphoric engagement to systemic repression is
explored in much greater detail in I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine (2008), a
raucous installation of eight film fragments transferred to video, each six minutes
in duration.29 These fragments now have a life of their own but the original impe-
tus for their creation was to provide visual accompaniment to the opera’s instru-
mental interludes, as discussed above, and brief excerpts from all of them
appeared in one place or another in the Met production. The fragments were
constructed using three main techniques: the main one was stop-motion anima-
tion, though the charcoal drawing Kentridge typically uses for this process was
largely replaced by a collage mode of drawing with scraps of black paper, which
coalesce to form shapes before dispersing once again. There was also a consider-
able amount of live-action footage, the product of workshops Kentridge held in
his studio, in which actors or the artist himself performed very loosely choreo-
graphed tasks such as dancing, twirling, marching, drawing, dragging, prancing,
climbing, or horse-stepping. Selected sequences of this footage were then project-
ed frame by frame and overlaid with collage materials (often depicting the Nose),
and then reshot. Last but not least, some of the film fragments incorporated
archival film footage. The combination of these techniques meant that the princi-
ple of erasure that has driven most of Kentridge’s work since the late 1980s ceded,
in I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Me, to that of montage, thereby according nicely
with what Shostakovich referred to as the technique of “literary montage” that he
had used in the composition of the opera’s libretto.

Projected simultaneously in a dedicated, pitch-black gallery, the eight
fragment s share a single soundtrack, Ngilahlekelwe Ikhala Lami, which was

I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine (2008) premiered at the Sydney Biennale in June 2008,
29.
where it was installed in a derelict toolshed on Cockatoo Island in the middle of Sydney Harbor. My dis-
cussion is based on its installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, where it formed part of the traveling exhibition organized by Mark
Rosenthal, William Kentridge: Five Themes.

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Kentridge. Stills from A Lifetime of Enthusiasm, as seen
in I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine. 2008.
Photograph by John Hodgkiss.

arranged by Philip Miller (a Johannesburg-based composer with whom
Kentridge has often worked), with music and lyrics by Thulani Manaka and his
Apostolic Faith Choir in conjunction with Richard Siluma.30 Because the projec-
tion uses all four walls of the gallery, it is not physically possible to view the eight
fragment s simult aneously, nor do they seem to have any given sequence.
Evading both totality and linearity, the installation is a cluster of short visual
essays that, taken together, constitute a commemorative portrait of the October
Revolution and its destruction: “an elegy (perhaps too loud for an elegy) both
for the formal artistic language that was crushed in the 1930s,” Kentridge sug-
gests, “and for the possibility of human transformation that so many hoped for
and believed in during the revolution.”31

One of the fragments, A Lifetime of Enthusiasm, presents a procession, a
frequent topos in both the artist’s work (Shadow Procession [1999], Procession on

See Philip Miller, “Ngilahlekelwe Ikhala Lami,” in William Kentridge, I Am Not Me, The Horse

30.
Is Not Mine/William Kentridge ( Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, 2008), pp. 56–58.
31.

See William Kentridge, “The Nose: Learning from the Absurd,” in ibid., p. 9.

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Kentridge’s Nose

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Vladimir Tatlin. Float for May Day Parade. 1925.

Anatomy of Vertebrates [2000], and Portage [2000]) and that of Gogol (the scene in
Kazan Cathedral and another in The Inspector-General). The film begins on an ecsta-
tic note: a dancer suddenly whirls into the frame, swirling a long satin red banner
into arabesques, like a lascivious tongue. His movements are wild, exaggerated,
and full of promise. As he leaps forward, his hat is dislodged and falls to the
ground, transformed into a tumbling black circle. It is at this point that we notice
that this revolutionary is clad in a great coat like the one worn by the Police
Inspector in The Nose; as soon as we see this, his banner begins to disintegrate and
then, in less than an instant, is gone altogether. Already here, then, we have the
suggestion that Revolution and Terror are not being plotted at different points on
a temporal trajectory—Revolution in 1917, Terror in 1937—but are rather con-
tained within one another, like the two sides of a dyad. (This same figure is seen
again in the dance soliloquy Country Dances I [Shadow], a studio “improvisation of
African imaginings of Russian dances.”32) But in A Lifetime of Enthusiasm, this revo-
lutionary-cum–Police Inspector has a specific job to do: he is the standard bearer
announcing the arrival of the procession’s guest of honor—the Nose—who kneels
on a rudimentary litter borne aloft by a squad of four marching figures. Following
in his wake are those who transport like spolia the now iconic emblems of the
avant-garde: a megaphone-shaped wedge; fragments of graphic designs by
Lissitzky, Rodchenko, and Popova; and shards of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third
International —this last having itself appeared as a float in a May Day parade held
in Leningrad in 1925.

32.
Fragments,” in ibid., p. 29.

See William Kentridge, “I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine: Installation of 8 Film

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OCTOBER

But as the procession continues in A Lifetime of Enthusiasm, its mood grad-
ually changes from ecstatic to downtrodden, the parade of enthusiasts becoming a
straggling line of refugees or even a chain gang. Harnessed, a single figure drags a
float bearing a host of figures including, once again, the Nose. Metamorphosis
begins to give way to its flipside, the grotesque: along limps a megaphone—one of
the artist’s perennial motifs, which he shares with Klucis—mounted atop a pair of
pliers. Again the Nose reappears, his litter dragged now not by one but four har-
nessed human beasts of burden. A black circle swoops into view, followed by an
abject, mechanomorphic agglomeration of graphic insignia. By this point, the
procession looks more like Otto Dix’s War Invalids (1920) than the Revolution tri-
umphant. When the Nose reappears a fourth (and final) time, he is superimposed
upon the body of the wildly cavorting revolutionary-cum–Police Inspector with
which the film began, while the remaining participants are bent double under the
weight of the visual iconography of the Revolution, which they now carry on their
breaking backs, like so many pieces of salvaged detritus.

It would be easy to read A Lifetime of Enthusiasm as an ironizing swipe at the
ubiquitous festivals, anniversaries, and parades of Soviet life as mere pathetic rituals
of forced spontaneity. “To live in Stalin’s era was to be condemned to a lifetime of
enthusiasm,” Kentridge writes. “The marches, the May Day parades, the Five-Year
plans fulfilled in three or four years. These were the symbols and proofs of the suc-
cess of the Soviet experience.”33 But to reduce the film to irony would be to trivialize
its elegiac tone and ambition, its celebration of, and lament for, all those who per-
sisted in their faith in the possibility of social transformation, notwithstanding the
Terror mounting everywhere around them, and perhaps most frighteningly of all,
already within themselves. “What I am interested in,” Kentridge clarifies, “is that
part of the enthusiasm that could not be extinguished even as, from the 1920s on,
the cost, the casuistry and terror of that enthusiasm became clearer.” This is “a pro-
cession determinedly going towards an uncertain destination.”34

The Nose, and his entourage of ambulatory mechanical devices concate-
nated out of the graphic objects of the avant-garde—such as Lissitzky’s Of Two
Squares (1920) and Klucis’s Radio Orator no. 5—reappear in three other films in
Kentridge’s installation: Commissariat for Enlightenment; His Majesty, the Nose; and
the eponymously titled I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine. In these, the Nose
metamorphoses from one creative figure to the next, heading/hooding any num-
ber of bodies, including that of Rocinante, Pavlova t wirling en pointe,
Shostakovich playing the piano, and even the artist himself. But already in His
Majesty, the Nose the explicit repression of the Revolution has begun. Over and
over again, the Nose, sported by Kentridge in a task-oriented solo performance,
climbs the studio stepladder, only to be kicked back down—and shattered—by an
invisible force at the very moment he reaches the summit. As frustration mounts,

33.
34.

Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid.

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Kentridge’s Nose

an array of printed words and phrases appear on the screen, blurting out the vio-
lence inflicted upon the Nose, who here stands in for the revolutionary subject
forced into “self-repudiation,” “abjection,” and so forth.

His Majesty, the Nose thus sets things up well for the two other films pro-
jected on the same wall, Prayers of Apology and That Ridiculous Blank Space Again,
which present piercing commentaries on this repression, though each in a differ-
ent modality. Prayers of Apology comprises the factographic projection of a montage
of excerpts from the transcription of the February–March 1937 Plenum of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which Nikolai
Bukharin and Aleksei Rykov were arraigned and denounced as clandestine mem-
bers of the treasonous Right Opposition.35 Within the context of Kentridge’s film
installation, Bukharin becomes an historical personification of the Nose: “It was
me / it was me, who was beaten with a stone,” he declares at one point in the film
fragment. Though not a show trial per se—that would not come for another
year—both defendants were arrested at the Plenum’s conclusion and imprisoned
as part of the Stalinist campaign to destroy the Old Bolsheviks, the remaining wit-
nesses to the October Revolution.

But Bukharin refused to play his assigned role in this pseudo-judicial
farce—which was to confess to his guilt—insisting instead on mounting a legalis-
tic defense of his innocence as well as revealing to the committee the intolerable
psychological state in which he found himself. (It was during his speech to this
Plenum that Lazar Kaganovich, the Secretary of the Central Committee, asserted
that instead of confessing to their guilt, Bukharin and Rykov simply kept denying

35.
For a transcription of the Plenum and related documents, see J. Arch Getty and Oleg V.
Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–39, trans. Benjamin Sher
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 364–419.

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Kentridge. Stills from
That Ridiculous Blank
Space Again, as seen in
I Am Not Me, The
Horse Is Not Mine.
2008. Photograph by
John Hodgkiss.

OCTOBER

it, constantly “repeating the old proverb, ‘Never laid eyes on them!’ [‘Ia ne ia, i
loshad’ ne moia,’ lit., ‘I am not me, the horse is not mine’].”36) With his excep-
tional ear for the absurd, Kentridge adapts some of the Plenum’s most sadistic
exchanges, for example: “Bukharin: But you must understand—it’s very difficult
for me to die. / Stalin: And it’s easy for us to go on living?! / (Noise in the room,
prolonged laughter).” While the factographic economy of Prayers of Apology makes
it a unicum in the installation—it comprises simply a moving typescript—it is
worth noting that Kentridge has often experimented with the use of documentary
materials in the past, most especially in the animated film Ubu Tells the Truth
(1997), in which he juxtaposed the testimony of witnesses to the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission with his drawn fictional protagonists.

In contrast to the factographic economy with which the persecution and
repression of Bukharin is presented, That Ridiculous Blank Space delivers its com-
mentary on the Terror in the form of a duet of paper scraps played out in the
graphic language of Lissitzky and Oskar Schlemmer. (Taken from Gogol’s story,
this fragment’s title is an utterance repeated several times by Kovalyov in his
despair about his noseless face.) The film begins with the animation of the kernel
of Lissitzky’s Civil War period lithographic poster, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
(1920), the purpose of which had been to exhort local participation in the
Bolshevik and anarchist struggle against the armies of the White Generals and
other forces of counter-Revolution. A white circle enters the frame and takes up a
position in the center of a black field. A smaller red circle enters from upper left
and bounces against the perimeter of the white one before exiting the frame; the
red circle then returns with a red rectangular appendage, and taps, taps, taps
against the perimeter of the circle, as if trying to enter; it then exits only to return
quickly once again, this time as a concatenation of red circle, red rectangle, and
red triangle. Its tapping on the white circle becomes now more urgent and insis-
tent, but it still fails to penetrate the latter’s perimeter and disperses off-field. A
piece of off-white paper, with the word “Awful” typed upon it, appears atop the
white circle. Then, suddenly, a large red wedge bursts in from upper left, hurtling
rapidly toward the white circle, its sharp point successfully penetrating the
perimeter. In a matter of four or five hefty thrusts, the white circle is broken into
shards. Out of these shards steps a strange mechanomorphic being who soon
encounters a curvilinear Schlemmerian figure who, rather ominously, has a small
white circle for a head and a club-like arm. The two court and eventually
embrace—hence the film’s subtitle, “A One-Minute Love Story”—but within sec-
onds the white Schlemmerian figure turns on its red lover, sadistically beating him
or her to death with its club-arm, and then dragging offstage the broken body
parts. The violence in That Ridiculous Blank Space thus comes full circle: beat the
whites red and they’ll eventually come back to get you.

That Kentridge rejects the use of violence to further revolutionary objectives

36.

See ibid., p. 389.

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El Lissitzky. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. 1920.

is suggested by a remark he makes apropos a famous verse by Vladimir Mayakovsky
from Left March (1923): “Silence, you orators! / Comrade Mauser, you have the
floor.” (The poet’s reference is to Peter Ermakov, who became known as comrade
Mauser after he shot the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna in the mouth with his
Mauser pistol.) Like Frantz Fanon, Kentridge asserts, Mayakovsky had “a deluded
belief in the purifying effect of violence,” his suicide in 1930 being but “the clearest
demonstration that once it had the floor, the Mauser would keep its place.”37 This
is the insight, perhaps almost a truism, that haunts Kentridge’s filmic elegy overall:
given the Revolution’s recourse to violence, Terror was necessarily latent within it.
Hence the dyadic figure of the trail-blazing revolutionary-cum–Police Inspector in
A Lifetime of Enthusiasm. Hence “the Party eating itself,”38 one Bolshevik/Bukharin/
Nose/artist at a time. But if, due to the Bolsheviks’ Mauser-like hold on power,
Terror came as much from within as from above, it must also be acknowledged that
a latency is not the same thing as an inevitability. There must be a catalyst—an his-
torical factor or factors—to bring that latency to the surface, to make it manifest.
This catalyst remains unspecified in the film installation.

As I write these sentences, I am aware that they are in a sense antagonistic
to the very principle of I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, which, as an installation
of filmic fragments, has gone out of its way—in its very form and format—to dis-
rupt the efficacy or even possibility of literal-minded paraphrases or deductions.
Yet the compulsion to find meaning here is inexorably strong. In his theatrical

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See Kentridge, “I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine: Installation of 8 Film Fragments,” in

37.
Kentridge, William Kentridge, p. 23.
38.

See William Kentridge, I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, p. 42.

OCTOBER

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Shostakovich. The Nose. Production directed and designed by William Kentridge.
2010. Photograph by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

monologue, I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, Kentridge refers to this as the
“pressure for meaning”:

One sees a series of abstract black shapes, and one will force them
into a meaning for oneself. So that even as one tries to say, no, it’s a
series of sheets of black paper, that are being torn and manipulated,
one cannot stop oneself seeing a figure, a shape, a horse, a form.
What is this pressure for meaning? It’s about the pressure for mean-
ing we have inside us, where you finish everybody else’s sentences.
You finish them literally, if they stop halfway through. But otherwise
even as they are speaking, we are predicting the rest of the sentence.
It’s as if we have sent someone ahead, to the road ahead, to look
around the corner and see what is coming, and come back and report
to us what is there. And with this push for meaning we latch onto any
half-word or half-image and make sense of it. And once a meaning is
found, we hold onto it even as it disintegrates. We do this with
images, but also with ideas, so that even as utopia is dead, we hang
onto its skeleton, hoping to resurrect it through a wish, a will.39

39.

Ibid., pp. 39–40.

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Kentridge’s Nose

The Death of the Nose

For better or worse, Kentridge’s film installation I Am Not Me, The Horse Is
Not Mine—and the constellation of profound issues and concerns that it raises—
inevitably stays with us when we watch his production of Shostakovich’s opera at
the Met, prompting us to zero in on the ultimate repression of the Nose and the
role therein of the latter’s chief antagonist, the Police Inspector. If Gogol had dis-
tributed the forces of the imperial police state across a hierarchy of officers of the
law, the composer concentrated these figures in this single punitive and venal
character, the kvartal’nyi nadziratel’ (district constable). At the Met, this role was
sung by the Russian tenor Andrei Popov, who truly inhabited this extremely diffi-
cult tenor-altino part, producing an extraordinarily high tessitura that was
extreme, hysterical, and deeply fascinating.40 As noted at the outset, the Police
Inspector—who is identified by no proper name—looms menacingly over citizens
and subordinates alike, both live and in projection. But it is only in the long and
protracted seventh scene of Act III, in which the emancipated Nose finally meets
his end, that the Police Inspector fully emerges for the first time.

Significantly, none of the events that transpire in this scene—including
the beating to death of the Nose—are to be found in Gogol’s short story. Instead,
the entire scene is an interpolation by Shostakovich and his co-librettists based on
a single line in the “The Nose” (“We caught it just as it was about to drive off in
the Riga stagecoach,” the Police Inspector tells Kovalyov).41 In an attempt to pre-
serve the unity of his style, however, the librettists recycled various other texts by
Gogol in writing the scene’s dialogue.42

The setting is the outskirts of St. Petersburg—that liminal space between
city and the beyond. (The libretto places the action at the hitching post for a
stagecoach, but Kentridge sets it in the vicinity of a railway station, with the pro-
jection of a Soviet-era train schedule serving as the main backdrop.) It is night.
The scene opens with the Police Inspector drilling and tormenting his motley
posse of ten slovenly subordinates as they lie in wait to ambush a worker. His voice
shrill and piercing, Popov also played the drill for laughs, kicking his poor minion
Petrushka in the backside. A searchlight scanning the upper reaches of the prosce-
nium from left to right reveals the Nose in projection, contentedly rocking in his
chair, reading his newspaper. Despite the bumbling slapstick of the policemen
there is something palpably ominous about the scene—an atmosphere of dread, a
sense of foreboding—which intensifies with the arrival of each prospective passen-
ger on stage: a couple plead with their friend not to risk the dangers of traveling
at night, such as highway robbery by bandits (a random notice in the collage back-
drop reads “but your spine has been smashed”). Parents prepare to send their

Popov, a member of the Mariinsky Theater Company, sings the role of the Police Inspector

40.
also on the Mariinsky recording of The Nose cited in note 9, above.
41.
42.

Gogol, “The Nose,” p. 60.
Shostakovich, “K prem’ere ‘Nosa,’” p. 12; quoted in “Editor’s Note,” n.p.

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OCTOBER

masked children away on a journey all alone. An elaborately masked woman, wear-
ing an exquisite white coat with ermine trim—the libretto identifies her as the
Elderly Lady—sings about her impending death. More and more people enter,
and a crowd begins to form.

Suddenly disrupting this lugubrious and disquieting scene, a gay and
wholesome seller of bubliki (bagel-shaped sweet breads) rushes on stage, hoping to
find customers among the soon-to-be departing passengers. But she is quickly sur-
rounded by the posse of policemen, who harass her with salacious taunts, vulgar
pelvic gestures, and lascivious gropings at her bosom and behind. As their taunting
escalates—in the libretto there is an implicit suggestion of rape—the upper reaches
of the proscenium are suddenly illuminated to reveal an astounding projection of
the Nose looming overhead. A witness to this act of sexual and class violence, the
Nose attempts to come to the bubliki -seller’s succor. Brandishing two red-square
flags up and down like semaphore, he goes berserk, firing off a volley of red squares.
These hurtle down to the stage floor in order to liberate the victim from her oppres-
sors, a veritable animation of a page from Lissitzky’s Of Two Squares (1922). This is
the most agitated the Nose has ever been, and it is pure Kentridge.

In the midst of the projected Nose’s frantic intervention, the live giant
papier-mâché Nose scampers down the upper ramp, hurrying to make the Riga
train. The Police Inspector raises his hand to stop him, a shot is fired, and sudden-
ly all the policemen set upon the papier-mâché Nose, beating him to death as the
crowd—and most especially the Elderly Lady—eggs them on. “Take that, take
that, take that” the chorus cries in unison some forty-three times. (I should note
that in the libretto, the Nose is beaten by the entire crowd-turned-mob—the stage
direction reads: “Everyone surrounds the Nose and beats him”-—and thus not
only by the policemen.)43 The projection on the screen above is even more graph-
ic: a rapid montage shows the Nose being crushed from all sides, his legs giving
way beneath him. As he collapses to the ground, the chorus cries “Nose” over and
over again, and an enormous projection of that word in Cyrillic fills the entire
proscenium. At the end of this violent frenzy, a little appendage-sized nose is
found on the ground and quickly if disdainfully pocketed by the Police Inspector.
A whistle blows and the crowd goes on its merry way, as if nothing at all has hap-
pened. The stage darkens and almost a full minute of Country Dances I is projected
overhead. The Revolution is over, the Police Inspector has triumphed, with more
than a little help from the mob. (In the next scene he will “sell” the appendage
back to Kovalyov in exchange for a gold pocket watch and a sizeable contribution
to the cost of his children’s education.)

With the addition of this scene, Shostakovich has clearly pushed Gogol’s
absurdist satire much further than its author would seem to have intended it to
go. Line by line the composer patiently builds a dramatic portrait of the violent
repression of the Nose, the opera’s beautiful and absurd figure of revolutionary

43.

See Shostakovich, The Nose, libretto, p. 48.

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Kentridge’s Nose

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Shostakovich. The Nose. Production directed and designed by William Kentridge.
2010. Photograph by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

transformation, which Kentridge stages in the form of a brutal pantomime. But
Shostakovich also underscores the way in which this repression takes place at the
hands of a senseless mob, incited to violence by an atmosphere of fear and intimi-
dation. Patching the scene’s dialogue together from other Gogol texts, and pack-
aging the whole as satire, the composer found a way to adumbrate the culture of
denunciation that was increasingly coming to characterize his own historical
moment, even as early as 1928, in both the political and aesthetic realms.44 But
Shostakovich was a believer and, despite what he saw about him over the course of
the next decade and beyond—including, the execution of Meyerhold and count-
less others from his circle in the Terror of the late 1930s—he kept on at it.
“Shostakovich could shift throughout his life between an irreverent, absurd view
and pleasure in the world, and at times play the trumpet for the edifice as loudly
as anyone, with a conviction that was more than simply self-preserving or strate-
gic,” Kentridge writes. “The need for belief and the power of that belief are not
just foolishness or self-service. They are also about hope.”45 In his production at
the Met, Kentridge found a way to house that hope, that faith. “Even as utopia is
dead, we hang onto its skeleton, hoping to resurrect it through a wish, a will.”46

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