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Dmitri Sanin, a lonely man of fifty-two, finds an old garnet cross in a drawer and remembers the summer of 1840, when, as a young Russian traveller in…
Dmitri Sanin, a lonely man of fifty-two, finds an old garnet cross in a drawer and remembers the summer of 1840, when, as a young Russian traveller in Frankfurt, he walked into an Italian sweet shop and helped revive a boy who had fainted. He fell in love with the boy's beautiful sister, Gemma, fought a duel for her honour, and became engaged to her. To raise money for their marriage, he went to sell his estate to the rich wife of a schoolfellow, the fascinating Maria Nikolaevna, and in a few days at the spa of Wiesbaden he lost everything.
Context and significance
Ivan Turgenev published the short novel in 1872, and it is one of his most beautiful and painful stories of first love and weakness. This translation is by Constance Garnett. Compare Turgenev's First Love, and Other Stories and his great novel Fathers and Sons.
About the author
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) grew up on an estate in central Russia owned by his tyrannical mother, who controlled thousands of serfs. He studied in Berlin, and his Sportsman's Sketches, with their sympathetic portraits of serfs, made him famous; an obituary of Gogol earned him a month in detention and exile to his estate.
He spent much of his life abroad, following the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he loved for forty years, and became a friend of Flaubert and a bridge between Russian and Western literature. His novel Fathers and Sons gave the world the word nihilist.