Vladimir Petrovich Voldemar, a 16-year-old, is staying in the country with his family and meets Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, a beautiful 21-year-old woman, staying with her mother, Princess Zasyekina, in a wing of the manor. This family, with many of the Russian minor nobilities with Royalties of that time, were only afforded a degree of respectability because of their titles; the Zasyekins, in the case of this story, are a very poor family. The young Vladimir falls irretrievably in love with Zinaida, who has a set of several order (socially more eligible) suitors whom he joins in their difficult and often fruitless search for the young lady's favor.
Chapter 1 1
I was sixteen then. It happened in the summer of 1833.
I lived in Moscow with my parents. They had taken a country house for the summer near the Kalouga gate, facing the Neskuchny gardens. I was preparing for university, but did not work much and was in no hurry.
No one interfered with my freedom. I did what I liked, especially after parting with my last tutor, a Frenchman who had never been able to get used to the idea that he had fallen 'like a bomb' (comme une bombe) into Russia, and would lie sluggishly in bed with an expression of exasperation on his face for days together. My father treated me with careless kindness; my mother scarcely noticed me, though she had no children except me; other cares completely absorbed her. My father, a man still young and very handsome, had married her from mercenary considerations; she was ten years older than he. My mother led a melancholy life; she was forever agitated, jealous, and angry, but not in my father's presence; she was very much afraid of him, and he was severe, cold, and distant in his behavior.... I have never seen a man more elaborately serene, self-confident, and commanding.
I shall never forget the first weeks I spent at the country house. The weather was magnificent; we left town on the 9th of May, on St. Nicholas's Day. I used to walk about in our garden, in the Neskuchny gardens, and beyond the town gates; I would take some book with me – Keidanov's Course, for instance – but I rarely looked into it, and more often than anything declaimed verses aloud; I knew a great deal of poetry by heart; my blood was in a ferment and my heart ached – so sweetly and absurdly; I was all hope and anticipation, was a little frightened of something, and full of wonder at everything, and was on the tiptoe of expectation; my imagination played continually, fluttering rapidly about the same fancies, like martins about a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed, was sad, even wept; but through the tears and the sadness, inspired by a musical verse, or the beauty of the evening, shot up like grass in spring the delicious sense of youth and effervescent life.
I had a horse to ride; I used to saddle it myself and set off alone for long rides, break into a rapid gallop, and fancy myself a knight at a tournament. How gaily the wind whistled in my ears! or turning my face towards the sky, I would absorb its shining radiance and blue into my soul, which opened wide to welcome it.
I remember that at that time the image of woman, the vision of love, scarcely ever arose in definite shape in my brain; but in all I thought, in all I felt, lay hidden a half-conscious, shamefaced presentiment of something new, unutterably sweet, feminine....
This presentiment, this expectation, permeated my whole being; I breathed in it, and it coursed through my veins with every drop of blood ... it was destined to be soon fulfilled.
The place where we settled for the summer consisted of a wooden manor house with columns and two small lodges; in the lodge on the left, there was a tiny factory for the manufacture of cheap wallpaper.... I had more than once strolled that way to look at about a dozen thin and disheveled boys with greasy smocks and worn faces, who were perpetually jumping onto wooden levers, that pressed down the square blocks of the press, and so by the weight of their feeble bodies struck off the variegated patterns of the wall-papers. The lodge on the right stood empty and was to be let. One day – three weeks after the 9th of May – the blinds in the windows of this lodge were drawn up, women's faces appeared at them – some families had installed themselves in it. I remember the same day at dinner, my mother inquired of the butler who was our new neighbor, and hearing the name of the Princess Zasyekin, first observed with some respect, 'Ah! A princess!' ... and then added, 'A poor one, I suppose?'
'They arrived in three hired flies,' the butler remarked deferentially, as he handed a dish: 'they don't keep their carriage and the furniture of the poorest.'
'Ah,' replied my mother, 'so much the better.'
My father gave her a chilly glance; she was silent.
Certainly, Princess Zasyekin could not be a rich woman; the lodge she had taken was so dilapidated and small and low-pitched that people, even moderately well-off in the world, would hardly have consented to occupy it. At the time, however, all this went in at one ear and out at the other. The princely title had very little effect on me; I had just been reading Schiller's Robbers.