One can be serious without being absurd at an early hour like this, when nothing is real except such things....
Andrey Vassilievitch and myself have puzzled you, have we not?
I have seen you watching us very seriously, as though we were figures in a novel, and that has amazed me, because you must not be solemn about us.

You'll understand nothing about Russian life unless you laugh at it during at least half the week.
"Almost five years ago I met Andrey Vassilievitch at a friend's house in Petrograd.

He was an acquaintance of mine of some years' duration, but I had avoided him because he seemed to me the last kind of man whom I would ever care to know.

I had been at this time five years in Petrograd and had now a good practice there as a surgeon.

I was a successful man and I knew it, but I was also a disappointed man because my idealism, that was being for ever wounded by my own actions, would not die.