Where It's Thin, It Breaks

“The other evening the day before yesterday, Annenkov was reading to us your comedy ‘Where It Is Thin, There It Tears,’” wrote N. A. Nekrasov on September 12, 1848, from Petersburg to Paris to Turgenev. “Without exaggeration, I can tell you that it’s hard to find in Russian current literature any little things more graceful and more artistic. Well invented and well executed—kept up to the very last word. This is a view not of mine alone, but of everyone who listened to this comedy, and there were about ten of them…”