"A Nervous Breakdown" is an 1889 short story by Anton Chekhov.
Vasilyev, a law student, is persuaded by his friends Meyer and Rybnikov to take an evening cruise through the Lane, a red light district in Moscow. As they move from one brothel to another, Vasilyev gets more and more distressed with what he sees. Disgusted with the general air of apathy and indifference, he tries to strike up conversations with the women but is shocked by the dullness of the response. His attempts at constructing a more or less logical picture of the inner mechanism of this place, and the motivations behind it, fail too.
