It is a novel without stridency, true to life in the subtlety of its detail, well-wrought in the care and delicacy of its dialogue and descriptive writing, touched by a wry humorousness and the lustre of a warm, civilized intelligence. To present-day tastes its treatment of love may seem low-toned, even a trifle mawkish; perhaps the nightingales have a way of singing a little too appropriately and the stars shine just a little too sweetly for our neon-dazzled eyes. If time has taken its toll in this respect, in all other respects it is a novel that beautifully evokes an age and has the magical property of a fiction that gives a lucid being to its characters which time has not obscured. This translation has striven, by attempting to represent the original Russian as faithfully as possible, neither to increase nor to lessen that obscurity.

Home of the Gentry
I

A BRIGHT spring day was drawing towards evening; small pink clouds stood high in a clear sky and seemed not so much to float past as to recede into the very depths of the blue.

Before the opened window of a handsome house, in one of the streets on the outskirts of the provincial town of O… (it was 1842), sat two ladies, one of fifty and the other an old lady of seventy.

The first was called Marya Dmitrievna Kalitin. Her husband, formerly a provincial procurator and well known in his time as a businessman – a lively and decisive chap, contentious and stubborn – had died ten years before. He had received an unusually good education and had been to a university, but, being born in poor circumstances, he had early understood the need to make his own way in the world and accumulate money. Marya Dmitrievna had married him for love: he had been handsome, clever and, when he wished, very courteous. Marya Dmitrievna (whose maiden name was Pestov) had lost her parents when she was still a child and had spent several years in an institution in Moscow; and when she returned from there she lived about thirty miles from O…, in her native village of Pokrovskoye, with her aunt and elder brother. This brother soon moved to St Petersburg on government service and kept his sister and aunt in virtual bondage to him until his death put an end to his career. Marya Dmitrievna inherited Pokrovskoye, but did not live there long; in the second year of her marriage to Kalitin, who had succeeded in capturing her heart after only a few days’ courtship, Pokrovskoye was exchanged for another estate that was much more profitable, but inelegant and lacking a manorial house. At the same time Kalitin acquired a house in the town of O… as a permanent residence for his wife and himself. The house had a large garden and on one side it faced open country beyond the town. ‘So,’ decided Kalitin, who was no lover of rural quiet, ‘there’ll be no need to go traipsing off into the country.’ More than once Marya Dmitrievna pined for her pretty Pokrovskoye with its gay little stream, broad meadows and green woods, but she did not gainsay her husband in anything and stood in awe of his intellect and knowledge of the world. When, after fifteen years of marriage, he died, leaving her a son and two daughters, Marya Dmitrievna had become so accustomed to her house and to town life that she had no wish to leave O…

In her youth Marya Dmitrievna had enjoyed a reputation as a very pretty blonde, and at fifty her features were not devoid of pleasantness, although they had become a little puffy and fat. She was more emotional than kind-hearted and had retained the ways of a schoolgirl even into her maturity, indulging herself, being easily irritated and even becoming tearful when her routine was disturbed; on the other hand, she was very charming and courteous when all her wishes were fulfilled and no one contradicted her. Her house belonged among the pleasantest in the town. She was extremely well-off, due not so much to what she had inherited as to what her husband had acquired. Both her daughters lived with her; her son was being educated at one of the best official schools in St Petersburg.

The old lady sitting with Marya Dmitrievna by the window was that very same aunt, her father’s sister, with whom she had once spent several solitary years in Pokrovskoye. She was called Marfa Timofeyevna Pestov. She passed for an eccentric, was of independent character, spoke the truth to people’s faces and acquitted herself on the most modest means as if she were worth thousands. She could not tolerate Kalitin, and as soon as her niece married him she retired to her own village, where she spent ten whole years living in a peasant’s hut that did not even have the amenity of a chimney. Marya Dmitrievna was always apprehensive of her. With black hair and rapidly darting eyes even in her old age, small and sharp-nosed, Marfa Timofeyevna walked about with a lively step, held herself very straight and spoke quickly and distinctly in a delicate, resonant little voice. She invariably wore a white cap and a white blouse.

‘What is it?’ she suddenly asked Marya Dmitrievna. ‘What are you sighing for, my dear?’

‘Just sighing,’ the other murmured. ‘What marvellous clouds!’

‘Sighing because you’re sorry for them, is that it?’

Marya Dmitrievna did not answer.

‘Why doesn’t that Gedeonovsky come?’ asked Marfa Timofeyevna, briskly plying her needles (she was knitting a large woollen scarf). ‘He’d be able to keep you company in your sighs – or tell some tall story or other.’

‘You’re always so severe about him! Sergey Petrovich is an eminently respectable man.’

‘Eminently respectable!’ the old lady repeated sarcastically.

‘And how devoted he was to my late husband!’ declared Marya Dmitrievna. ‘He cannot be indifferent to his memory even now.’

‘Of course he can’t! It was your husband who dragged him out of the mud by the ears,’ Marfa Timofeyevna muttered, and the needles worked even quicker in her hands.

‘He looks so inoffensive,’ she began again, ‘with all his grey hair, but as soon as he opens his mouth he either tells lies or spreads scandal – and he’s a councillor, mind you! Well, it’s only to be expected; after all, he’s the son of a priest!’

‘Who is faultless, aunt dear? Of course he has this weakness. Sergey Petrovich hasn’t, of course, received a proper education and cannot speak French. But no matter what you say, he is an agreeable man.’

‘Agreeable, yes, because he’s always kissing your hands.