A Reckless Character and Other Stories

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Sep 2020 · Library of Alexandria

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There were eight of us in the room, and we were discussing contemporary matters and persons, I do not understand these gentlemen! remarked A. They are fellows of a reckless sort . Really, desperate . There has never been anything of the kind before. Yes, there has, put in P., a grey-haired old man, who had been born about the twenties of the present century; there were reckless men in days gone by also. Some one said of the poet Y zykoff, that he had enthusiasm which was not directed to anything, an objectless enthusiasm; and it was much the same with those people their recklessness was without an object. But see here, if you will permit me, I will narrate to you the story of my grandnephew, M sha P lteff. It may serve as a sample of the recklessness of those days. He made his appearance in God's daylight in the year 1828, I remember, on his father's ancestral estate, in one of the most remote nooks of a remote government of the steppes. I still preserve a distinct recollection of M sha's father, Andr i Nikol evitch P lteff. He was a genuine, old-fashioned landed proprietor, a pious inhabitant of the steppes, sufficiently well educated, according to the standards of that epoch, rather crack-brained, if the truth must be told, and subject, in addition, to epileptic fits . That also is an old-fashioned malady . However, Andr i Nikol evitch's attacks were quiet, and they generally terminated in a sleep and in a fit of melancholy. He was kind of heart, courteous in manner, not devoid of some pomposity: I have always pictured to myself the Tzar Mikha l Fe dorovitch as just that sort of a man.