The most nonsexual sex story ever: by Leonid Tsypkin

This week's (maybe last week's? - delivery here sucks) New Yorker story is from a Soviet writer, Leonid Tsypkin, who apparently was born in 27 and died in the 80s - story was from about 1972, if I remember correctly - and he was one of the million Soviet/Russian authors who had a complete separate career, as a physician or scientist or something - those over-achievers. The story, The Last Few Kilometers, is really nothing more than a moment out of a life: a middle-aged man is riding a train home, through the bleak outer suburbs of Moscow, having just had a sexual liaison with his "mistress" - he's completely enervated, in fact you'll probably never find a story about a sexual liaison with less sexuality: he's completely lackluster and indifferent, has no great desire for the woman or really for anything. The story is as bleak as they come - and in that sense a pitch perfect description of the ugliness of the late Soviet period - the squalid houses by the railroad tracks, the drab one-room apartments, the lousy and overpriced food (the central motif of the story is the chicken and rice dinner she cooks for him - he drops a drumstick, he later sees it in the kitchen - she's going to rinse it off and consume it later - thrift, thrift), the pathetic statuary and emblems glorifying the workers, who in actuality, like the protagonist, are tired, with the life beaten out of them - completely ugly story that captures its moment, in just a page and half, as sharply as anything written in the period. Nevertheless, it's just a fragment - possibly a piece from a longer work - which I suspect would be pretty much unreadable. Not all Soviet life (or art) was like this - I recall being really impressed with the excitement about the underground art and music scene in Moscow in the same era in the works of V. Aksayomov. But I can surely imagine that the Soviet authorities wanted nothing like this published under their noses - ever. I know nothing about Tsypkin's publication history, but I'm not surprised we're seeing this story in English now for the first time.