The Nose knows - a precursor of surrealism and Dada

Really not sure today what to say about Nicolai Gogol's story "The Nose" as - about half-way through this fairly long story - it is funny and surreal and doesn't yet make a lot of sense. Perhaps as with other oddities, you just have to go along for the ride and see where Gogol takes you. First part of the story, a barbar gets up one morning, hungry for a loaf of onion bread (not his typical breakfast) and in midst of loaf as he's slicing (you get the Freudian stuff - though this predated Freud by about 70 years) he finds a nose - the nose of one of his clients. He tries, with much frustration, to get rid of the nose, which he finally tosses into the river; meanwhile, the customer, a minor Russian official, wakes up that morning without his nose, and goes off in pursuit of it - to the police, then to a newspaper office where he places a lost/found ad. That's as far as I've gotten (read story some years ago and don't remember the outcome) - so it's peculiar and kind of funny. In its surrealism and its psychological symbolism - knives, razors, missing body parts, hmm? - the story is a foreshadowing of obviously Kafka, maybe Singer, and certainly other fantasists, surrrealists, and Dadaists, such as Borges - in other words way ahead of its time. If you could scrub out the chronological details - the horse-drawn carriages, the many references to official rank - the story could just as easily be set in 1920 as 1840. Shostokovich based an opera on The Nose - wonder what he saw that was operatic about this material. Will have a better sense, I hope, when I finish the story.