Vasilyev

A young widower who, on the night his wife's coffin stands in the next room, shoots himself in a botched suicide attempt (a superficial wound between the fifth and sixth ribs) and cannot find the nerve to fire a second shot; the narrator dresses his wound and sits with him until morning as he talks, by turns despairing and theatrically self-mocking. A year later he has recovered completely, wholly returned to sociable life, and cannot supply the story of his own near-death with anything but a joking ending.