An opera at the Bolshoi theatre playing a Bulgakov piece is attended by Stalinist accomplices including official Zhdanov.

However, cacophony starts a day later as Muddle Instead of Music editorial is written in the Pravda newspaper that intends to target Meyerhold and Shostakovich.

Shostakovich at the hospital bed sent reply back through a postcard to the director stating authorization to use the opera as the soundtrack for the film.

[2] The first time Khrzhanovsky heard of the full version of the opera The Nose was at a 1974 play rendered by the composer Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

Composer Shostakovich used to write music for Meyerhold in the early 1900s whose Soviet Union plays violated the regulations of Stalin's government.

The script writing team in collaboration by Yuri Arabov continued to recognize the pattern of the repression of the arts that were also found in the symbolism of the play The Nose.

At a session in Kinotavr, critics noted the developing script needed more refinements with request to remove Meyerhold's story.

[6] The script describes the innovators and mavericks in arts and science from the twentieth and twenty-first century who came at the crossroads of authoritarian societies.

Condensed into three parts with an adaptation that included Antiformalist Rayok, the script references an unprecedented meeting of such people as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bulgakov, Gogol and Stalin.

The director was inspired by this event to create a multi-screen collage approach to edit and combine different fragments and stories with stylistic switching.

[9] The film tried to re-order the discordant chronological events in the same way a museum orders the culture and heritage "into a coherent, intelligible whole."

[14][15] The animation team drew the film using cut-outs, drawings, and live-action collages to bring to life the phantasmagoria sequences of the script.

[25] Originally nominated as Nos Ili Zagovor Ne Takikh, the name has been updated to Nose or the Conspiracy of Mavericks.

The review stated, "allowing the improbable to take place - creative alliances and human encounters-for example, Gogol, Meyerhold and Shostakovich.

Khrzhanovsky boldly mixes formats, painting genres and techniques - he comes out with a radical and cool collage that combines the seemingly incongruous - the aesthetics of Russian pictorial realism and revolutionary futurism.

"[9] Kino Teatr stated, "The musical side of the film becomes so winning that at some point it literally separates from the visual series and hovers over a slightly chaotic plot that mixes Imperial Petersburg and limousines, Naum Kleiman and Bratkov from the nineties, Stalin and his inner circle with Nabokov and Aeroflot planes, Anton Dolin and Volga boatmen in one cauldron.

"[10] Veronika Khlebnikova reviewed, "In Khrzhanovsky's film, iconic figures of the Russian cultural code are placed in an eccentric collage.

"[7] Anton Dolin believes the film isn't movie but is instead an exposition of music and literature: "Khrzhanovsky's utopian plane, in which his friends and like-minded people gathered, where everyone has their own movie and their own freedom on the screen, soars in the air like a bird or an impossible machine with a perpetual motion machine.

"[12] French Annecy review by Mathieu Le Bihan remarked the film is a unique form of animation: "It deviates from the beaten path and plays with eras to better develop them on the screen.

"[13] PM Cicchetti of Filmexplorer states the film is a postmodern collage/catalogue of "smattering of images, styles, media, from across the centuries."

The review also stated, "Optics is one of the great strengths anyway: The Nose or Conspiracy of Mavericks uses a variety of techniques, but especially those of Cutout Animation.

The film is cleverly constructed and offers a huge variety of information with countless quotations from art, culture, history and politics.

"[15] Director Khrzhanovsky states The Nose could be part of a future trilogy with the film being the sequel to A Room and a Half.