EN
The paper sets out to analyse Bruno Jasienski’s grotesque story, The Nose, published in 1936. The tale focuses on the dream motif as its principal compositional device. By obfuscating the borderline between a state of sleep and that of the protagonist’s awakening, the author is able to expose his true personality, as well as the hidden fears — and, more importantly, his guilty conscience. The dream becomes an effective device in exposing a world that is increasingly subjected to the racialist ideologies epitomised by Nazism. However, the inherently grotesque ambivalence of all aspects of the story affects its interpretation, extending its satirical goals beyond the immediate context of Nazi Germany, to the universal, attacking the absurdity of all ideologies that insist on classifying people in terms of some arbitrary external criteria that have nothing to do with their essential humanity.