We had to act out the beginning of “Nina in Siberia,” explaining our actions and thoughts aloud, using the maximum number of grammatical structures. I hadn’t prepared at all, but felt incredibly, unprecedentedly fluent. “Now I have to talk to Ivan’s father,” I said. “Great. He doesn’t like me. He’s never liked me. I know just what he’ll say, in a gloomy voice: ‘God alone knows.’ Oh, that’s how it always is with me.”

The professors laughed. I realized that everyone in the room was sympathetic with Nina, with her objective situation, which was so abnormal and so bad. Within the world of the story, nobody mentioned or acknowledged that things were abnormal, and so one tended to accept them unquestioningly. But if you pointed out the abnormality—if you could just state it factually—people in the real world would recognize it and laugh.