The young teacher Viktor Sluzhkin is a controversial personality: a cheerful joker, on the one hand, a lonely person incapable of emotional intimacy, on the other.
The concept of “modern holiness” adopted by him (“This is when you are not a guarantee of happiness to anyone and no one is a guarantee of happiness to you, but that you love people and people love you”) in practice does not allow him to get close to people.
But one day the chitinous shell cracks… A man who has been hiding from the world in armor out of jokes and fooling around for a long time, for the first time finds himself outside it and acutely feels his own vulnerability. Overcoming the temptation to return to a cozy shell is very difficult.
ALPHABET, 512 p.