1
Fathers and Sons
By Ivan Turgenev
(1861)
Translated from Russian to English by Richard Hare.
Translation copyright 1948 by Hutchinson & Co., Publishers, Ltd.
Translation copyright not renewed, so entered into the public domain in the U.S. in 1977.
Dedicated to the memory of
Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky
Chapter 1
"WELL, PYOTR, STILL NOT IN SIGHT?" WAS THE QUESTION ASKED ON 20th May, 1859, by a gentleman of about forty, wearing a dusty overcoat and checked trousers, who came out hatless into the low porch of the posting station at X. He was speaking to his servant, a chubby young fellow with whitish down growing on his chin and with dim little eyes.
The servant, in whom everything--the turquoise ring in his ear, the hair plastered down with grease and the polite flexibility of his movements--indicated a man of the new improved generation, glanced condescendingly along the road and answered, "No, sir, definitely not in sight."
"Not in sight?" repeated his master.
"No, sir," replied the servant again.
His master sighed and sat down on a little bench. We will introduce him to the reader while he sits, with his feet tucked in, looking thoughtfully around.
His name was Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov. He owned, about twelve miles from the posting station, a fine property of two hundred serfs or, as he called it--since he had arranged the division of his land with the peasants--a "farm" of nearly five thousand acres. His father, a general in the army, who had served in 1812, a crude, almost illiterate, but good-na