Aleksandra Fomina

The love triangle: wife, husband and his mistress, amusingly crumbles because the loving writer is fleetingly infatuated with a third woman, young and inexperienced, rightly believing that an artist needs a muse every day, not a wife and mistress.

In 19th-century Russia, a peasant named Ivan Flyagin tells his his life story to fellow travellers aboard a steamship.