- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
Ivan Yakovlevich struggles to figure out how a nose made its way into his breakfast. Looking down at the nose, a stunned Ivan Yakovlevich recites the common Russian expression, “Devil knows how it happened” (or, in Russian, “черт его знает как это сделалось”). The declaration reflects the story’s setting (St. Petersburg in 1836), a notably superstitious and Christian place where people would regularly attribute misfortune to the devil.
In blaming the devil, Ivan Yakovlevich demonstrates an inability to square the magical elements of this story with the world he knows. That is, Ivan Yakovlevich quickly determines that he cannot make…