Russian Silhouettes Author:Anton Pavlovich Chekhov Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A TRIFLE FROM REAL LIFE ILITCH BELAYEFF was a young gen- tleman of St. Petersburg, aged thirty-two, rosy, well fed, and a patron of the race-tracks. Once, tow... more »ard evening, he went to pay a call on Olga Ivanovna with whom, to use his own expression, he was dragging through a long and tedious love-affair. And the truth was that the first thrilling, inspiring pages of this romance had long since been read, and that the story was now dragging wearily on, presenting nothing that was either interesting or novel. Not finding Olga at home, my hero threw himself upon a couch and prepared to await her return. "Good evening, Nikolai Ilitch!" he heard a child's voice say. "Mamma will soon be home. She has gone to the dressmaker's with Sonia." On the divan in the same room lay Aliosha, Olga's son, a small boy of eight, immaculately and picturesquely dressed in a little velvet suit and long black stockings. He had been lying on a satin pillow, mimicking the antics of an acrobat he had seen at the circus. First he stretched up one pretty leg, then another; then, when they were tired, he brought his arms into play, and at last jumped up galvanically, throwing himself on all fours in an effort to stand on hishead. He went through all these motions with the most serious face in the world, puffing like a martyr, as if he himself regretted that God had given him such a restless little body. "Ah, good evening, my boy!" said Belayeff. "Is that you ? I did not know you were here. Is mamma well?" Aliosha seized the toe of his left shoe in his right hand, assumed the most unnatural position in the world, rolled over, jumped up, and peeped out at Belayeff from under the heavy fringes of the lampshade. "Not very," he said shrugging his shoulders. "Mamma is never really well. She is a wom...« less