Os malefícios do tabaco

Ivan Ivanovitch Nioukhine — husband of Madame, director of a music school and a girls’ boarding school — is a man for all chores in his wife’s institutions, to whom he has been married for 33 years. Besides office bureaucracy, pedagogical work, teaching, kitchen management and other domestic activities such as rat hunting, he also gives lectures on scientific subjects for charitable purposes at the local guild in a provincial town somewhere in Belle-Époque Russia. But this time, at the scheduled lecture on The Harmful Effects of Tobacco, accumulated sadness and frustrations…