A man wakes one morning and finds his nose gone. He attempts to track it down through the streets of his city, going to the police, placing newspaper advertisements for its return, seeking medical advice. When he does meet his nose (in a cathedral) he realises to his dismay that his nose is of a higher rank than he is. His own nose will not speak to him. When his nose is arrested (trying to leave the city in disguise), it will still not rejoin his face. But one morning he wakes and his nose is back in place.

This is the substance of the short story "The Nose". written by Nikolai Gogol in 1837 and described by Chekhov as the greatest short story ever written. "I am not me, the horse is not mine" is an eight channel film installation, which takes the short story, its earlier history and its possible future histories as the basis for looking at the formal inventiveness of different strains of Russian Modernism and the calamatous end of the Russian avant-garde.