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  The genesis of Turgenev’s heroine may be in doubt; there is no doubt that Turgenev’s hero is based to a great extent on autobiographical experience. Lavretsky’s portrait is the fullest of any hero in Turgenev’s novels. His life is traced to its source in the mixed blood of his birthright and the vivid record of his boyhood, adolescence and early adulthood. With this burden of experience, mature and vulnerable, he appears at the fiction’s beginning. His emotional and psychological state is explored carefully and charted with a subtle exactitude through the various stages of the novel. His is obviously the dominant portrait. But Turgenev devoted great care also to the characterization of Panshin, second only (among the minor figures) to the care which he lavished on the wickedly convincing portrait of Lavretsky’s wife, Varvara Pavlovna. Convincing and detailed observation of character traits, rather than a plumbing of psychological states, is the principle governing Turgenev’s portrayal of such minor figures. They have the veracity of roles well acted upon a stage. There is a theatrical principle also about the way in which Turgenev offers his fiction to us. Despite the freedoms permitted by the novel, he restricts the action of his work to a particular time and place, and supplies his characters with biographies and characteristics in order to ‘place’ them in a particular setting and then permit them to enact their separate roles within those confines. It is not difficult to see how the novel is composed of different worlds which are contiguous but alien: Marfa Timofeyevna’s world upstairs, Marya Dmitrievna’s downstairs, the world of the Kalitins’ home and the external official or social world represented by Panshin and Varvara Pavlovna, Lavretsky’s world of Vasilyevskoye and the modest, cell-like world of Liza’s room. The destinies of the characters appear to be dictated by the worlds to which they belong and are ultimately as separate and irreconcilable as are the two figures of Lavretsky and Liza in our final glimpse of them.

  No other work by Turgenev is quite so ‘Turgenevan’ as this novel. At its first appearance in 1859 it received abundant critical praise. In the West, particularly in England, it suited Victorian tastes and appealed to many writers, some of whom, like Galsworthy, show signs in their work of having imitated its quietly elegiac tone. 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. So he doesn’t speak French – a great pity that is! I’m not very strong myself in the French “dialect”. It’d be better if he didn’t speak any language at all, then he wouldn’t tell lies. But there he is, speak of the devil,’ added Marfa Timofeyevna, glancing at the street. ‘Striding along, he is, your agreeable man. What a long, thin fellow, just like a stork!’

  Marya Dmitrievna patted her curls. Marfa Timofeyevna looked at her with a wry smile.

  ‘What’s that, my dear, surely it’s not a grey hair? You must give your Palashka a talking-to. What’s she got eyes for?’

  ‘Oh, auntie dear, you’re always…’ muttered Marya Dmitrievna in vexation and began tapping her fingers on the arm of her chair.

  ‘Sergey Petrovich Gedeonovsky!’ squeaked a rosy-cheeked servant-boy, jumping in from behind the door.

  II

  A TALL man entered in a smart frock-coat, rather short tight trousers, grey chamois gloves and two cravats – a black one on top and a white one below. Everything about him exuded propriety and respectability, beginning with his noble-looking face and smoothly combed temples right down to his shoes that were heel-less and squeakless. He bowed first to the mistress of the house, then to Marfa Timofeyevna and, slowly drawing off his gloves, approached Marya Dmitrievna’s hand. Having kissed it respectfully twice in succession, he sat down unhurriedly in an armchair and inquired with a smile, rubbing the tips of his fingers together:

  ‘And is Elizaveta Mikhaylovna well?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Marya Dmitrievna, ‘she is in the garden.’

  ‘And Elena Mikhaylovna?’

  ‘Lenochka is also in the garden. Haven’t you any news for us?’

  ‘Haven’t I indeed,’ the guest responded, giving slow winks and protruding his lips. ‘Hm!… mark you, there is something very surprising about this piece of news: Fyodor Ivanych Lavretsky has come back.’

  ‘Fedya!’ exclaimed Marfa Timofeyevna. ‘Are you sure you’re not making this up, my good man?’

  ‘Not in the least. I saw him with my own eyes.’

  ‘Well, that’s hardly any proof.’

  ‘He looks very well,’ Gedeonovsky continued, pretending not to have heard Marfa Timofeyevna’s remark, ‘broader in the shoulders than he ever was and a good colour in his cheeks.’

  ‘So he looks very well,’ said Marya Dmitrievna, pausing between the words. ‘What, I wonder, is there to make him look so well?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ responded Gedeonovsky, ‘another man in his place would have thought twice about appearing in society.’

  ‘Why so?’ interrupted Marfa Timofeyevna. ‘What sort of nonsense is that? A man has returned to his birthplace – where else do you want him to go? And anyhow he wasn’t to blame!’

  ‘A husband is always to blame, I beg to inform you, my good lady, when a wife behaves herself badly.’

  ‘You say that, my good sir, because you’ve never been married.’

  Gedeonovsky gave a forced smile.

  ‘Permit me to be so curious as to inquire’, he asked after a short silence, ‘for whom that charming scarf is intended?’

  Marfa Timofeyevna directed a quick glance at him.

  ‘It is intended for someone’, she replied, ‘who never gossips, is never underhand and never makes up stories, if there is such a person in the world. I know Fedya well. All he can be blamed for is spoiling his wife. Well, yes, of course, he also married for love, and nothing worth while ever comes of love matches.’ the old woman added, glancing sideways at Marya Dmitrievna and rising to her feet. ‘And now you, my good sir, can sharpen your teeth on anyone you like, even on me; I’m going, I won’t be any more bother to you.’

  And Marfa Timofeyevna went out.

  ‘That’s how she always is,’ said Marya Dmitrievna, following her aunt with her eyes, ‘always!’

  ‘Ah well, at her age! There’s nothing to be done about it!’ remarked Gedeonovsky. ‘Mark you, her ladyship was kind enough to mention “someone who is never underhand”. But who is never underhand nowadays? It’s a sign of the times. A friend of mine, highly respectable and, I assure you, a man of no mean rank, has made a habit of saying that nowadays even a chicken – to give you one instance – can’t approach a grain without being underhand, darting up to it, you know, and pecking it sideways. But now that I look at you, my dear lady, I see you have a truly angelic temperament. Permit me to kiss your snowy white hand.’

  Marya Dmitrievna smiled faintly and extended to Gedeonovsky her plump hand with the little finger raised. He pressed his lips to it while she moved her chair towards him and, bending slightly forwards, asked in a low voice:

  ‘So you’ve seen him? Ishe really all right, you know – healthy, happy?’

  ‘Indeed he’s well and happy,’ answered Gedeonovsky in a whisper.

  ‘And have you heard by any chance where his wife is now?’

  ‘She was lately in Paris; now it’s said she’s settled in Italy.’

  ‘Fedya’s position is certainly horrible; I don’t know how he endures it. Misfortunes can happen to anyone, of course, but his, one might say, have been broadcast all over Europe.’

  Gedeonovsky gave a sigh.

  ‘Yes, indeed, indeed. They say, you know, that she’s keeping company with artists and with pianists, and with lions, as they call them over there, and wild beasts of every sort. She has completely lost all shame…’

  ‘I’m very, very sorry,’ declared Marya Dmitrievna. ‘I speak as a relative: you must know, Sergey Petrovich, that he’s a second cousin of mine.’

  ‘Of course, of course. How could I not know everything that concerns your family? Indeed I do know it.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll come to see us?’

  ‘It must be supposed he will; yet it’s said he’s intending to go to his own house in the country.’

  Marya Dmitrievna raised her eyes heavenwards.

  ‘Ah, Sergey Petrovich, Sergey Petrovich, when I consider how careful we women must be in how we behave!’

  ‘Not all women are the same, Marya Dmitrievna. There are unfortunately those of inconstant temperament… and of course those of a certain age. And again there are those who have not been taught the rules when they were little.’ (Sergey Petrovich drew a blue check handkerchief out of his pocket and began to unfold it.) ‘Such women do exist, of course.’ (Sergey Petrovich raised a corner of the handkerchief to each eye in turn.) ‘But generally speaking, if one considers, that is… There’s an extraordinary amount of dust in town today,’ he concluded.

  ‘Maman, maman,’ cried a pretty little girl of eleven, running into the room, ‘Vladimir Nikolaich is coming to visit us on horseback!’

  Marya Dmitrievna rose. Sergey Petrovich rose also, bowed, said: ‘Our most humble respects to Elena Mikhaylovna,’ and, withdrawing into a corner out of politeness, proceeded to blow his long straight nose.

  ‘What a wonderful horse he has!’ the little girl continued. ‘He was by the gate a moment ago and told Liza and me he’d ride right up to the porch.’

  A clatter of hooves was heard outside, and the well-knit figure of a rider on a beautiful bay horse appeared in the street and stopped before the open window.

  III

  ‘GOOD DAY, Marya Dmitrievna!’ exclaimed the rider in a resonant and pleasant voice, ‘How do you like my new purchase?’

  Marya Dmitrievna approached the window.

  ‘How do you do, Woldemar! Oh, what a splendid horse! Who did you buy it from?’

  ‘From the remount man. He charged me dearly for it, the thief.’

  ‘What do you call it?’

  ‘Orlando…. But it’s a stupid name; I want to change it…. Eh bien, eh bien, mon garçon.… How re
stless he is!’

  The horse was snorting, prancing and tossing its foam-flecked muzzle.

  ‘Lenochka, stroke him, don’t be afraid…’

  The little girl stretched her hand out of the window, but Orlando suddenly reared up on his hind legs and shied away. The rider did not lose control, gripped the horse with his legs, drew his whip against his neck and, despite his resistance, brought him back again in front of the window.

  ‘Prenez garde, prenez garde,’ Marya Dmitrievna urged repeatedly.

  ‘Lenochka, stroke him,’ said the rider. ‘I won’t let him get out of hand.’

  The little girl again stretched out her hand and shyly touched the quivering nostrils of an Orlando who ceaselessly trembled and champed.

  ‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Marya Dmitrievna. ‘Now get down and come in and see us.’

  The rider swiftly turned the horse, pressed in his spurs and, after galloping a short way along the street, rode into the yard. A moment later, waving his whip, he ran through the hall door into the drawing-room; at that very instant a graceful, tall, dark-haired girl of about nineteen appeared in another doorway – Marya Dmitrievna’s elder daughter, Liza.