What is Nikolai Gogol’s e Nose About? (Or the Smell of Law) Elena Loizidou One morning, Ivan Yakovlevich, resident of St. Peters- burg and a popular barber, wakes up to the smell of fresh loaves of bread popping out of his wife’s oven. He chooses to have a loaf of bread with some onions. He cuts it in half and sees something unusual in the loaf. Curious to find out what this shiny object is, the bar- ber puts his finger in the bread. He extracts a nose. is is not any nose. It is the nose of one of his customers, the Collegiate Assessor, Kovalyov. Fearful of the con- sequences of being found with the nose, Yakovlevich rushes to the river where he proceeds to throw the nose in its moving waters. From the very start Nikolai Gogol’s short story ‘e Nose’ makes us feel perplexed – how could a nose be baked into a fresh loaf of bread without anyone seeing it? Why did it not burn? – curious – oh, and what hap- pens now that the nose has been thrown in the river? Will its lawful owner ever be reunited with it and have