Translated from the Russian By CONSTANCE GARNETT Fifteen years ago–began H.–official duties compelled me to spend a few days in the principal town of the province of T—-. I stopped at a very fair hotel, which had been established six months before my arrival by a Jewish tailor, who had grown rich. I am told […]

Translated from the Russian By CONSTANCE GARNETT PIOTR PETROVITCH’S STORY … I am old and ill now, and my thoughts brood oftenest upon death, every day coming nearer; rarely I think of the past, rarely I turn the eyes of my soul behind me. Only from time to time–in winter, as I sit motionless before […]

Translated from the Russian By CONSTANCE GARNETT About thirty miles from our village there lived, many years ago, a distant cousin of my mother’s, a retired officer of the Guards, and rather wealthy landowner, Alexey Sergeitch Teliegin. He lived on his estate and birth-place, Suhodol, did not go out anywhere, and so did not visit […]

Translated from the Russian By CONSTANCE GARNETT I Reader, do you know those little homesteads of country gentlefolks, which were plentiful in our Great Russian Oukraine twenty-five or thirty years ago? Now one rarely comes across them, and in another ten years the last of them will, I suppose, have disappeared for ever. The running […]

Translated from the Russian By CONSTANCE GARNETT I In the year 182- … there was living in the town of O—- the lieutenant Ivan Afanasiitch Pyetushkov. He was born of poor parents, was left an orphan at five years old, and came into the charge of a guardian. Thanks to this guardian, he found himself […]

Translated from the Russian By CONSTANCE GARNETT I … We were a party of eight in the room, and we were talking of contemporary affairs and men. ‘I don’t understand these men!’ observed A.: ‘they’re such desperate fellows…. Really desperate…. There has never been anything like it before.’ ‘Yes, there has,’ put in P., a […]

One day in autumn on my way back from a remote part of the country I caught cold and fell ill. Fortunately the fever attacked me in the district town at the inn; I sent for the doctor. In half-an-hour the district doctor appeared, a thin, dark-haired man of middle height. He prescribed me the […]

VILLAGE OF SHEEP’S SPRINGS, March 20, 18–. The doctor has just left me. At last I have got at something definite! For all his cunning, he had to speak out at last. Yes, I am soon, very soon, to die. The frozen rivers will break up, and with the last snow I shall, most likely, […]

FIRST DAY The sight of the vast pinewood, embracing the whole horizon, the sight of the ‘Forest,’ recalls the sight of the ocean. And the sensations it arouses are the same; the same primaeval untouched force lies outstretched in its breadth and majesty before the eyes of the spectator. From the heart of the eternal […]

In a small, decently furnished room several young men were sitting before the fire. The winter evening was only just beginning; the samovar was boiling on the table, the conversation had hardly taken a definite turn, but passed lightly from one subject to another. They began discussing exceptional people, and in what way they differed […]

A few years ago I was in Dresden. I was staying at an hotel. From early morning till late evening I strolled about the town, and did not think it necessary to make acquaintance with my neighbours; at last it reached my ears in some chance way that there was a Russian in the hotel–lying […]

Translated from the RussianBy Constance Garnett ‘Neighbours’ constitute one of the most serious drawbacks of life in the country. I knew a country gentleman of the Vologodsky district, who used on every suitable occasion to repeat the following words, ‘Thank God, I have no neighbours,’ and I confess I could not help envying that happy […]

Translated from the Russian By Constance Garnett A FRAGMENT FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A DEAD ARTIST I II III ‘Enough,’ I said to myself as I moved with lagging steps over the steep mountainside down to the quiet little brook. ‘Enough,’ I said again, as I drank in the resinous fragrance of the pinewood, strong […]

Translated from the RussianBy Constance Garnett …’Tell us a story, colonel,’ we said at last to Nikolai Ilyitch. The colonel smiled, puffed out a coil of tobacco smoke between his moustaches, passed his hand over his grey hair, looked at us and considered. We all had the greatest liking and respect for Nikolai Ilyitch, for […]

Translated from the Russian By Constance Garnett Yes, yes, began Piotr Gavrilovitch; those were painful days… and I would rather not recall them…. But I have made you a promise; I shall have to tell you the whole story. Listen. I I was living at that time (the winter of 1835) in Moscow, in the […]

Translated From The RussianBy Constance Garnett A STUDY I We all settled down in a circle and our good friend Alexandr Vassilyevitch Ridel (his surname was German but he was Russian to the marrow of his bones) began as follows: I am going to tell you a story, friends, of something that happened to me […]

Translated from the RussianBy Constance Garnett I A regiment of cuirassiers was quartered in 1829 in the village of Kirilovo, in the K— province. That village, with its huts and hay-stacks, its green hemp-patches, and gaunt willows, looked from a distance like an island in a boundless sea of ploughed, black-earth fields. In the middle […]

Translated from the RussianBy Constance Garnett I That evening Kuzma Vassilyevitch Yergunov told us his story again. He used to repeat it punctually once a month and we heard it every time with fresh satisfaction though we knew it almost by heart, in all its details. Those details overgrew, if one may so express it, […]

Translated from the Russian By Constance Garnett AN OLD MAN’S STORY I I will tell you my adventures with a watch. It is a curious story. It happened at the very beginning of this century, in 1801. I had just reached my sixteenth year. I was living at Ryazan in a little wooden house not […]

Translated From The RussianBy Isabel Hapgood I In the spring of 1878 there lived in Moscow, in a small wooden house on Shabolovka Street, a young man five-and-twenty years of age, Yakoff Aratoff by name. With him lived his aunt, an old maid, over fifty years of age, his father’s sister, Platonida Ivanovna. She managed […]