Poor Lucky Kolyvanova

The red girls’ school stood opposite a grey boys’ school, built five years after it as if to proclaim the rational symmetry of the world, but also so that the spirit of competition should not spill out aimlessly over the entire district but concentrate above their roofs and, dove-like, glow above the girls’ school, proclaiming it the more distinguished, excelling, as it invariably did, in academic achievement, the behaviour of its pupils and (inversely, of course) in its accident statistics.