A Lear of the Steppes, etc.

‘Oh, don’t laugh,’ she said earnestly, ‘or I shall say to you to-day what you said to me yesterday, “why are you laughing?”’ and after a brief silence she added, ‘Do you remembe...

‘My father was very kind, clever, cultivated, and unhappy. Fate treated him no worse than others; but he could not get over her first blow. He married early, for love; his wife,...

We had a very strange conversation yesterday. We touched first upon apparitions. Fancy, she believes in them, and says she has her own reasons for it. Priemkov, who was sitting...

I forgot to tell you in my last letter that when I got home from the Priemkovs’ I felt sorry I had mentioned _Faust_; Schiller would have been a great deal better for the first...

I cannot go on as I began, dear friend; it costs me too much effort and re-opens my wounds too cruelly. The disease, to use the doctor’s words, became defined, and Vera died of...

At the grave, too, Evlampia stood, as it were, lost. Thoughts were torturing her … bitter thoughts. I noticed that Sletkin, who several times addressed some remark to her, she t...

My dog actually had stopped short, before a thick oak bush which bordered a narrow ravine by the roadside. Prokofy and I ran up to the dog; a snipe flew up out of the bush, we b...

The road to the ruin went twisting down the steep incline into a narrow wooded valley; at the bottom ran a stream, noisily threading its way through the pebbles, as though in ha...

‘Martin Petrovitch!’ I began, seating myself beside him. ‘I know everything, you see, positively everything. I know how your son-in-law is treating you--doubtless with the conse...

About an hour passed by. Our coach drove into the yard; but our steward sat in it alone. And my mother had said to him--‘don’t let me see you without him.’ Kvitsinsky jumped hur...

My mother was exceedingly particular in her choice of acquaintances, but she made Harlov welcome with special cordiality and allowed him many privileges. Twenty-five years befor...

Sletkin took the paper in both hands, and began timidly, but distinctly, and with taste and feeling, to read the deed of partition. There was set forth in it with the greatest a...

When we both left the university in 183-- I was three-and-twenty. You went into the service; I decided, as you know, to go to Berlin. But there was nothing to be done in Berlin...

Sletkin’s ejaculations still reached my hearing, when suddenly at a turn in the road, I came upon the second daughter of Harlov, Evlampia, who had, in the words of Anna Martinov...

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I opened the letter. Gagin had written it; there was not one word from Acia. He began with begging me not to be angry at his sudden departure; he felt sure that, on mature consi...