The Project Gutenberg EBook of A House of Gentlefolk, by Ivan Turgenev

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Title: A House of Gentlefolk

Author: Ivan Turgenev

Translator: Constance Garnett

Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5721]
Posting Date: April 7, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK ***

Produced by L. Michelle Baker

A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK

By Ivan Turgenev

LIST OF CHARACTERS

Marya Dmitrievna Kalitin, a widow.
Marfa Timofyevna Pestov, her aunt.
Sergei Petrovitch Gedeonovsky, a state councillor.
Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky, kinsman of Marya.
Elisaveta Mihalovna (Lisa),
daughters of Marya.
Lenotchka,
Shurotchka, an orphan girl, ward of Marfa.
Nastasya Karpovna Ogarkoff, dependent of Marfa.
Vladimir Nikolaitch Panshin, of the Ministry of the Interior.
Christopher Fedoritch Lemm, a German musician.
Piotr Andreitch Lavretsky, grandfather of Fedor.
Anna Pavlovna, grandmother of Fedor.
Ivan Petrovitch, father of Fedor.
Glafira Petrovna, aunt of Fedor.
Malanya Sergyevna, mother of Fedor.
Mihalevitch, a student friend of Fedor.
Pavel Petrovitch Korobyin, father of Varvara.
Kalliopa Karlovna, mother of Varvara.
Varvara Pavlovna, wife of Fedor.
Anton,
old servants of Fedor.
Apraxya,
Agafya Vlasyevna, nurse of Lisa.

Chapter I

A bright spring day was fading into evening. High overhead in the clear
heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be
sinking into its depths of blue.

In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets of the government
town of O---- (it was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an
open window; one was about fifty, the other an old lady of seventy.

The name of the former was Marya Dmitrievna Kalitin. Her husband, a
shrewd determined man of obstinate bilious temperament, had been dead
for ten years. He had been a provincial public prosecutor, noted in
his own day as a successful man of business. He had received a fair
education and had been to the university; but having been born