The short story, “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt”, explicates the life of a man named Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka. We see him briefly in his young years, followed by his life in the army, and his return to the farm where his strong characterized aunt resides. We can see immediately that this man lives in constant cleanliness and dutiful paranoia; these are some of his desires that he wishes to exhibit to others. We can also see his fears, which reside in the confiscation of his masculinity and independence. This short story has many elements that resemble others in the Nikolai Gogol collection.Since Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka was young, his desires were clear and he made sure he reached them. Shponka was always a neat child: “His exercise book was always immaculate, with ruled margin and not a mark anywhere. He would always sit very quietly, his arms folded, his eyes riveted on his teacher. He never hung bits of paper on the back of the boy in front, never made carvings in the desks, and never played at shoving other boys off the benches just before the teacher came in.”(161-162). We can see in the previous quote that he was neat and preoccupied as he was seen by his teacher; he tried to keep the image of an angel. This angel image did not last due to the pancake incident. Shponka was pressured by his classmates to allow them to copy his work in exchange for a pancake. He was caught eating it by his teacher and became upset because of the fact that he lost his angel image. We can compare this to the incident in Gogol’s short story the “Nose”; the main character here loses his nose and instead of a nose he has a flat area: ”Flat just like a freshly cooked pancake”(56). This lose entailed a loss of his masculinity because he was paranoid about his outer appearance. In this case Shponka also loses an image he wanted to keep. Since he is so dutiful and loves to show this off his choi...
