“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin,” Chekhov concluded his seminal 1899 adultery story “The Lady with the Dog,” which Nabokov considered one of the greatest pieces ever written. “And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”

So it was for me, some one hundred and fifteen years later. And there, I begin.